Tom Wolfe on his sociological approach to writing:

This attention to status … started when I was in graduate school and I was in a program called American Studies, which was a mixture of different disciplines but one [in which] you were forced to take sociology. I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline that didn’t have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, ‘Hey, here’s the key. Here’s the key to understanding life and all its forms.’ And the great theorist or status theorist was a German named Max Weber. And from that time on, I said this obviously is the way to analyze people in all of their manifestations. I mean, my theory is that every moment — even when you’re by yourself in the bathroom, you are trying to live up to certain status requirements as if someone were watching … It’s only when your life is in danger that you drop all that.

Between 2000 and 2007, the gun homicide rate for black men between the ages of 14-17 increased by 40 percent. The rate for men over the age of 25 increased by 27 percent. In some neighborhoods, 1 in 200 black men are murdered every year.

— David M. Kennedy goes into cities and shuts down open air drug markets. He says the cities he works in are safer than they were when he started in 1985, but not by much.

Source: CDC

Tomorrow: the story of American medical care as seen from the perspective of an inner city Chicago hospital, where most of the patients are uninsured.

Tomorrow: the story of American medical care as seen from the perspective of an inner city Chicago hospital. We speak with Dr. David Ansell, whose experiences treating patients at Chicago’s public Cook County Hospital make a strong case for national health care reform.

chicago — (by Melody Kramer)