The Editorial Heidi Legg

The young mom sitting next to me, while sleep-deprived, seemed entirely put together and to the point. She had me at “derailed careers” and explained why she had created Neighborhood Villages to help young mothers and parents of young children thrive in today’s modern economy. Unbeknownst to me until we exchanged cards, I was speaking with Lauren Kennedy, a graduate of Harvard Law and married to U.S. representative from Massachusetts 4th Congressional District and current candidate for Senate Joe Kennedy. Lauren whats to formalize childcare for children ages 0-5 so both parents can thrive in parenting and careers.

GenX entrepreneur and social impact leader Diana Yousef, Founder and CEO of change:Water Labs, is bringing waterless toilets to refugee camps. One of the drivers for this Harvard graduate is that young women are often assaulted in the dark when they need to use the facilities at refugee camps around the globe.
I sat down with Yousef to hear more about the waterless toilet she is prototyping this summer, and what she sees as opportunity and barrier in the social entrepreneurship space at this moment in time.

As Americans loudly hammer out partisan views on the world stage these days, colleges and universities have been drawn into the fray as campuses, with speakers and their mobile-enabled audiences, become venues for audio and video that has a propensity to go viral. What was once considered healthy student debate can easily become a political inferno with a viral international following. Factions have formed, aligning people into either diversity or free speech advocates.
This bifurcation is something John Palfrey sees as mistaken. In his new book, Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces published by MIT Press, Palfrey says diversity and free speech share much more than not and argues both are imperative for a modern education and the promise of educating our youth in the American ideal. The former Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School offers clear examples of where the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of both diversity and free expression and he breaks down the trajectory of the past few decades that led to the fanning of these flames by provocateurs and by the emergence of a highly-interconnected world of viral platforms like Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook.

Hillary Chute is the Author of Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere and a Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. Her new book focuses on the maturing field of Comics, as she likes to call it, with the popularity of the graphic novel form. In this interview she breaks down the chapters of her book into Why Punk? Why Sex? Why Suburbs, and weighs in on the political power of comics, their cultural place in American history and the power of the drawn line. Heidi Legg dives in with Comics expert, author and Professor Hillary Chute in this compelling interview around a maturing field long nascent in America covering everything from superheroes, comics classics, graphic novels, sexual harassment, free speech, the emerging comics in the form of editorial and journalism and more. 

Heidi sits down with Dr. Jennifer Childs-Roshak, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, to debunk some of the myths that are being propagated in this country while all other developed nations and allies such as the UK, Canada, Sweden, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and (even Russia!) fund abortions using taxpayer dollars and see women's right to choose as a private matter between a woman and her doctor.

Michelle Kuo taught English at an alternative school in the Arkansas Delta for two years. After teaching, she attended Harvard Law School as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and worked legal aid at a nonprofit for Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California, on a Skadden Fellowship, with a focus on tenants’ and workers’ rights. She has volunteered as a teacher at the Prison University Project and clerked for a federal appeals court judge in the Ninth Circuit. Currently she teaches courses on race, law, and society at the American University in Paris.