The Smithian

"...I’m still impressed by the story of the Good Samaritan in the Bible, which was about seeing past ethnic or tribal categories. I wish Christians and other religions would learn that. We all just are who we are walking down the road. We want to be seen as no more and no less than that..."

...more than 1.2 million homeless persons were living in emergency shelters in 2012, including 479,423 whites...469,363 African-Americans...109,905 Hispanics, 8,615 Asians, 46,020 Native Americans, 8,444 native Hawaiians, and 90,135 persons of multiple races...

Neel Kashkari...is pro-choice, favors same-sex marriage rights and voted for Barack Obama in 2008...Kashkari said he has visited 80 communities to hear from Californians. He's stayed overnight in an Oakland homeless shelter, visited free clinics, volunteered at food banks, worked on docks and in farm fields and worshiped at a Pentecostal church in south Los Angeles...observers say the attention that GOP luminaries are lavishing on Kashkari—the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu—underscores the hunger for a new type of Republican in California, where the party holds no statewide offices.

On June 21, 2000, a homeless man named Sandro Do Nascimento boarded a commuter bus in Rio de Janeiro to rob some passengers and ended up hijacking the bus and taking the passengers as hostages. Police negotiators and SWAT team snipers surrounded the bus while reporters and onlookers watched the standoff unfold before their eyes for four hours. Director Jose Padilha uses video taken for Brazilian television along with accounts by the police, victims, witnesses, sociologists, social workers, and family and friends of the hijacker...[while] less sophisticated filmmakers would have just stuck with the crime and the commentary of law and order officials, Padilha uses the tragedy as an opportunity to examine poverty and the plight of street people in Rio de Janeiro.

...there are about 11,000 homeless Chicagoans between 14 and 21 years old, about 10 percent of the homeless population.

...the Warshawksi novels have only grown better...fiercer both in their feminist politics and in their commitment to storylines about social justice. A typical Warshawski investigation not only zooms in on the genre's "usual suspects" (greedy opportunists, professional con artists, dysfunctional families), but also the larger social ills plaguing contemporary America. Recent novels have explored the subjects of homelessness, illegal immigrants, domestic violence and the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights movement. Breakdown...tackles the ever-widening class divide in America, as well as the unchecked power of media pedagogues.