To say that Justin Portela never imagined himself as a highly paid business consultant at McKinsey & Company would be an understatement. He didn’t have a privileged upbringing, to put it mildly, and in 2018, when he first walked onto the Stanford University campus, Portela, like most incoming freshmen, was unaware such careers even existed. […]
In January 2010, the private prison operator now known as CoreCivic announced the closure of a 752-bed facility in Walsenburg, Colorado. At the time, the Huerfano County Correctional Center was the second-largest employer in the county. Its shutdown caused a “major hit” to the economy, said John Galusha, then the county’s administrator. The town estimated […]
As the US Marshals Service prepared for Donald Trump’s expected pardon of January 6 defendants, officials went to unusual lengths to facilitate the defendants’ travel home from the DC jail, newly obtained records show. The records, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by the ethics watchdog CREW, are yet another window into the […]
In 2023, while on a group hike through the Sipsey River, Ashley M. Jones, Alabama’s youngest and first Black poet laureate, sat in a clearing and wrote the titular poem of her new book, Lullaby for the Grieving. Just before she was named poet laureate in 2021, Jones’ father, Donald Lewis Jones, died without warning. […]
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Since 2021, the Sierra Club has been grading US utilities on their commitment to a clean-energy transition. While most utilities have not earned high marks on the group’s annual scorecards, as a whole they had been showing some progress. That’s over now. […]