Margaret Mary Vojtko was a longtime adjunct professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Earlier this month, she died penniless. She may have an even greater effect in death than in life.

It's not just that being poor is difficult; according to a new study, poverty actually makes it harder for you to think.

Decades ago, when a new drug called crack was tearing apart communities across the U.S., much of the concern about the epidemic revolved around so-called "crack babies." To speak frankly, the fear seemed to be that poor black women who were smoking crack while pregnant would give birth to a legion of black children…

McDonald's is under fire this week for launching a "budget planner" for employees that can best be summed up with the following maxim: If you don't want to end up homeless and possibly dead, get yourself a second job.

Atlantic Cities points to an amazing Urban Institute mapping tool that lets you see where poor people lived, by race, in every American city in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Answer: Basically everywhere.

"The typical household has regained less than half [the wealth lost in the recession]," according to a new analysis by the St. Louis Fed. "That's far below the estimate in a Federal Reserve report in March that calculated that Americans as a whole had regained 91 percent of their losses." Uhhh... yeah.

It's been well established that it sucks to be unemployed. And that it sucks to be undereducated. And that (in terms of socioeconomic equality) it sucks to be a woman (IN THE PATRIARCHY). And that it sucks to be white (no explanation necessary). Now, we know that the combination of all these things will, in fact, kill…

Ben Affleck, an actor who's won an Academy Award for pretty much everything but acting, is joining the Live Below The Line challenge, which aims to raise awareness about global poverty. As a part of the challenge, Affleck and other participants will only be allowed to spend $1.50 a day on food and drink from April 29…

In a study that surprises almost no one, the Bloomberg administration has found that half of New York City residents are "poor" or "near-poor" meaning that they were "making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold." This is a small rise in the amount of poor from 2009, when the recession officially ended. But…

The largest California outbreak of tuberculosis in a decade is happening in Los Angeles right now, and the Centers for Disease Control has finally dispatched a team of scientists to help LA-area authorities try to control it. The locus of the outbreak, which involves a strain of TB unique to LA, is the city's…

The next mayor of New York City will not be George McDonald, though George McDonald is running for mayor. That's OK. George McDonald is already better than any mayor has ever been at addressing the most obstinate social problems in this city's modern history.

In 1993, Jennifer Toth horrified the world with her book The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City. The work detailed the lives of the homeless citizens who’d established communities in the subway and railroad tunnels beneath the streets of New York. Though criticism of the validity of some of Toth’s…

Rampant violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is being blamed for a huge increase in the number of unaccompanied children being held in American detention centers after sneaking into the country. From the LAT:

After a day of failed fishing, Sergio Alvarez was homeless and hungry in Malibu last month when he says he did what millions of red-blooded Americans do every year when they want some food: He killed a bird in order to eat it. What Alvarez didn't know is that while the type of pelican he strangled to death wasn't…

We've been told by the financial experts for months now that the U.S. recession is officially over. That may be what the calculations say, but it certainly doesn't feel that way for the millions of Americans struggling to keep their heads above water, or their mortgages away from the financial cliff, or any of the…

I guess we'll start with the hotel. Ours is a shithole. A $250-a-night mildewy rathole for truckers and prostitutes on a decimated strip mall. Charlotte is the armpit of the south, a glorified half-dead exurb with some tall buildings planted in the middle. There are skeezy-looking tattoo shops everywhere, and none of…

China-based blog Beijing Cream offers the sad tale of a car crash that led to the spilling of 770 pounds of raw eggs — that's at least 6,000.

In the United States of America, we do not have debtors' prison. Right? Oh, so wrong. The financial and legal penalties for being poor in America are only getting worse.

The CDC has released its big huge annual report about this nation in which we live (America), and how our health is, here (in America). A special highlight this year is a detailed look at exactly how being poor and/ or uneducated will screw your health. (In addition to your sociopolitical status and fundamental sense…

The conventional wisdom is that since obesity rates are so high among the poorest Americans, that fast food is the grease-and-ketchup-soaked engine driving them upwards. But a new study on food consumption from UC Davis medical school got surprising results: It found that middle- and upper-middle income earners are…