THE TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES OF 2018-2019

The conservation group Reef Ecologic is using electrical currents to stimulate regrowth of damaged coral reefs, Alice Klein reported for New Scientist in September 2018. Coral reefs are crucial components of ocean ecosystems around the world, and damage to them from climate change and destructive fishing practices has been widely reported. Damaged coral regrows slowly, and rising ocean temperatures lead to bleaching that can cause entire reef systems to collapse permanently.

It is no wonder that school districts feel pressure to protect children. Between January 2015 and March 2019, there were 97 school shootings in 31 states that ended in the deaths of 94 people. Yet in January 2019, a state court in California ordered the Stockton Unified School District to rein in its use of “school resource officers” to protect students.

What has changed in the three years since court-mandated monitoring of California’s juvenile detention centers ended? As Samantha Michaels reported for Mother Jones, despite some good news—such as an overall decrease in the numbers of incarcerated youth—the situation is still “pretty grim,” and violence in the state’s juvenile detention centers has worsened significantly since court oversight ended.

School lunches are big business. As Korsha Wilson reported for YES! Magazine in November 2018, school districts nationwide spend a total of approximately three billion dollars annually on food contracts, most of which are with corporate food suppliers. As Beth Hopping, cofounder of the Food Insight Group, told YES!

While pundits and politicians explain downward mobility among millennials in terms of that generation’s unrealistic expectations, indulgent spending, and antipathy toward adulthood, sociologist Victor Tan Chen explained that the Great Recession “stunted millennials’ economic lives at a critical age” and that class inequalities—not “lousy values”—best explain many millennials’ poor economic prospects.

Google has further blurred the lines between market research and corporate invasion of privacy with the introduction of Google Opinion Rewards, a survey app for Android and iOS users that allows them to earn “rewards.” In exchange, Google gets access to the phone screens and web browser windows of the app’s users.