Equality and Opportunity

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Racial Equity Plan, released on April 6, commits New York City government to using racial classifications to guide more than two hundred goals across nearly every agency. Among other things, the plan commits specific percentages of city contracts to be doled out on the basis of race, a continuation of the city's longstanding ...

The 14th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees that all Americans are treated as equal individuals, not as members of a racial group. Yet for decades, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), using a legal theory known as disparate impact, pushed employers to do the opposite. Under disparate impact theory, an employer may be l ...

Imagine you've spent decades building something — a family business, a home, a legacy. You got the required licenses and even received written confirmation from the local government that everything you were doing was legal. Then, one day, the county knocks on your door with a bill for nearly $4 million. And when you try to appeal, they move to fr ...

If you're a typical shopper, you just want to shop in peace—when you stroll through the local mall, you expertly weave, dodge, and avoid eye contact with the well-intentioned salespeople pitching their wares as you go about your business. But the state of California has another obstacle for ordinary shoppers and introverts at the mall: a self-sty ...

Emily Tvrdy has given birth four times. Now, as she prepares for her fifth, she knows what type of birth experience she wants—and what type she wants to avoid. Three of her four children were born in a hospital. The first she describes as traumatic, involving complications, pain, and a long separation from her infant son. Medical decisions wer ...

When I wrote for The Star last December, I was in the middle of the fight of my professional life. The Kansas State Board of Nursing decided that giving speeches about dementia while my license briefly lapsed as I cared for my husband through cancer treatment constituted "unprofessional conduct." Its members wanted me to admit guilt and accept a pe ...

For more than 30 years, nurse practitioner Marcy Markes has cared for patients in intensive care units and small-town clinics across Missouri. She holds degrees from the University of Missouri and runs an allergy and asthma clinic in Columbia. Missouri has a serious health care access problem, and its residents would be better off if experienced pr ...

Last month, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York would opt into the new federal school choice scholarship program created by Congress. Beginning in 2027, the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit will allow taxpayers to receive a credit of up to $1,700 for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, which can then help families pay for tutoring, ...

Across the country, patients are struggling to access health care services — particularly those in rural areas, where driving long distances to see a specialist has become increasingly common. One area of acute shortage is eye care, where demand for services is rapidly outpacing the supply of ophthalmologists. Meanwhile, a large, highly traine ...