Who can get ahead—and what stands in the way.
Follow the systems that shape access to education, housing, healthcare and opportunity. Our reporting examines who benefits, who faces barriers and what changes for people trying to move forward.
Global accident rates improved in 2025 while North America’s rose, and the findings that explain October’s incidents will arrive long after the videos did.
The mall’s new fees arrive after years of concern about theft, robberies and violence in its parking areas. With license-plate cameras already monitoring vehicle movements, the shift raises questions about whether shoppers are paying for convenience, greater security or both.
The three-year rehabilitation is finished, but a new investigation found some of the worst traffic in more than two decades. The results raise questions about what expensive highway projects actually deliver.
Boston Logan International Airport wants a new voice to welcome millions of travelers. Thousands of Massachusetts residents auditioned, eight finalists remain, and the public gets the final say. But the competition comes as researchers warn that the city’s most recognizable accent is becoming less common.
More Chicago Public Schools students are graduating and entering college, but longer-term data shows that earning a postsecondary degree remains a challenge for many.
New grocery stores, renovated parks, restaurants and nightlife can transform a neighborhood into somewhere everyone wants to live. But those conveniences come with a price. From Harlem to Houston Heights, my own housing experiences reveal the complicated relationship between neighborhood improvements and affordability.
More than 9,700 teacher trainees received results requiring reexamination after Kenya relaxed admission requirements. The results are prompting questions about academic preparation, institutional support and the consequences of education reform.
Two travelers passed through Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport on the same day in early October. Both would become part of an expanding Ebola investigation, one in Kenya and the other in Nigeria. African health authorities are now examining whether their journeys intersected in a way that could help explain how the virus reached West Africa. The possibility remains unconfirmed, but the investigation has exposed a difficult problem for disease-control systems: a virus can move between countries faster than health authorities can establish where an infection occurred.
An apartment showing in Queens ended before it began when a real estate agent allegedly sent a racist message to prospective tenants. Now a Black couple is suing, raising questions about the decisions renters never see being made behind closed doors.
France’s student-led demonstrations have turned violent in places, yet coverage has kept their grievances in view. That raises an old question about American journalism: whether race shapes which protests are explained and which are simply described as disorder.
For a market trader, a familiar selling location is more than a place to arrange merchandise. It is where returning customers know to find them, where goods are delivered and where daily sales generate the money needed to restock inventory and support a household. When that space disappears, even temporarily, the consequences can begin long before a new building takes its place. Traders in Accra’s Madina Market are confronting that uncertainty as local authorities demolish an aging section of the commercial complex to make room for a modern facility.
For drivers, a new gas station is a convenience. For its owner, it’s an investment. For the family next door, it can mean more cars pulling in and out, bright lights, delivery trucks, noise and worries about fuel emissions. Houston has no conventional zoning to keep homes and businesses apart the way many U.S. cities do, and those competing interests are now at the center of a proposal to limit where gas stations can go.
Get SSC’s briefings and analysis in your inbox, or help us bring new reporting and expert voices to the conversation.