Children’s Fairlyland is a historic amusement park inside the nation’s first wildlife refuge at Lake Merritt, surrounded by bustling downtown Oakland, CA. This unique, urban utopia has attracted guests with its story-book charm since 1950 – including Walt Disney, who modeled his own park after visiting Fairyland. But recently, the park has been overrun with aggressive, boundary-less guests: the fox squirrel.
This Halloween, kids everywhere will be out trick or treating for candy. And while some might worry about the loot rotting our teeth, there’s another more potent risk. Traces of the powerful neurotoxin, lead, can be found in some candy. This isn’t a new concern. For more than a decade, we’ve known about harmful amounts of the metal showing up in chili-flavored sweets imported from Mexico. That problem was addressed, but the California Department of Public Health has found lead in some candies made and distributed in the US.
It’s a weekly ritual for some girls—stopping by the make-up counter to check out the latest beauty lines. At 19,…
On a tour of Dhaka, I visited a factory that was making clothes for some of my favorite brands. I saw hundreds of workers crowded around sewing machines and work-tables. The sound of whooshing looms and the chemical smell of dye filled the air. But it was watching a young girl, who was maybe 10, sewing a pair of jeans that made me feel really sick. My host sister later told me that many of these workers, mostly women and children, were living on less than 2 dollars a day.
