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Ferguson Revisited  

One year after the death of Michael Brown, the conditions that made Ferguson shorthand for economic, political, and carceral injustice remain unchanged.





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Border City Blues  

It is no coincidence that the starkest reactions to police violence—from Ferguson to Baltimore—have flared in cities strung along the Mason-Dixon Line.



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How Racism Became Policy in Ferguson  

The Justice Department report offers a glimpse of the systematically oppressive and petty policing in Ferguson. But in order to fully understand how racism became policy in the St. Louis suburbs, we need to look at the history of suburban development itself.



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Mapping Our Unequal States  

The “suspension bridge” of top income shares (based on the work of Thomas Piketty and colleagues) is by now a familiar icon of American inequality. In this rendering, top-end inequality (measured as the share of national income going to the …



The Segregation Index  

Percentage of black residents in Ferguson, Missouri: 67 Of black police officers: 5.7 Percentage of traffic stops targeting black residents in Ferguson: 86 Of arrests: 93 Distance in miles from Ferguson to St. Louis suburb of Ladue: 10 Rank of …





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Segregation’s Long Shadow  

What is remarkable in Ferguson is not just the way segregation has been sustained, but the way it maps so cleanly onto patterns of economic disadvantage.





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What This Month’s Jobs Report Doesn’t Tell Us  

This month’s jobs report was widely celebrated for showing that—after adding 217,000 jobs in May 2014—the United States had finally returned to the December 2007 (pre-recession) level of employment. This is a useful comparative benchmark, underscoring the unusual depth and …