Douglas McGray: All Publications, Events and Press

A Uniquely American DREAM

Articles — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 12:48:00 -0400

Thoughtful people will disagree about immigration policy -- how many foreigners to let in, for what purpose, and what to do about the 12 million illegal immigrants already in this country. That’s why sweeping immigration reform has failed again and again. This fall, Congress should think smaller, and figure out what it can agree on, before another year passes with no progress. It might start by considering young people like Lucia.

When Lucia’s parents dropped her off at a new elementary school in Los Angeles more than 15 years ago, she didn’t speak a word of English. And she didn’t really… more

Mr. Successful

adminn — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 01:52:00 -0400

Anyone who's ever been to a wedding knows not everybody can stand up in front of a roomful of people and just talk. Anthony Pico discovered by accident, at 15, that he has a gift for doing that. He's 18 now, and he's become so well known as a public speaker on the subject of foster care, which he knows well, he was appointed to a blue… more

Pop-Up Cities

Articles — Tue, 01 May 2007 10:14:00 -0400

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world -- the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

McKinsey wanted to know if the developer, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation,… more

Just One Thing Missing

Articles — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 03:48:00 -0400

Martha doesn't like to talk about her future anymore. She'd wanted to go to med school, become an OB-gyn. And she's exactly the kind of kid everyone roots for. She grew up in a poor, mostly immigrant neighborhood in East Los Angeles, where most people didn't graduate from high school, and nobody talked about college. But Martha got into UCLA. She couldn't believe it: UCLA.

She… more

The Downhill Battle: Global Warming and the Traveler’s World

Articles — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:38:00 -0500

When the aspen Ski Company launched its environment division -- a kind of green management team, think tank, and consultancy -- it was the first of its kind in the ski industry: an in-house watchdog to prevent the resort from gorging on energy and trampling its fragile ecosystem. Ten years later, the division’s director, Auden Schendler, spends at least as much time thinking about saving Aspen as he does about saving its environment. Both, it turns out, are highly vulnerable to climate change.

"I’m not concerned about all the snow going away in the year 2100," says Schendler’s longtime boss,… more

Network Philanthropy

Articles — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:43:00 -0500

They seemed so young. That’s what Peter Hero remembers most about the day, nine years ago, when Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll walked into his office at Community Foundation Silicon Valley with an odd idea to give away a fortune. Omidyar wore jeans and a T-shirt; his thick black hair was tied back in a ponytail. Skoll had on what looked to Hero like a varsity jacket. He couldn’t still be in high school, could he? Hero thought they were smart kids, nice kids too, but he’d never heard of their company and he was unsure about its prospects. "I… more

Humanitarian of the Year: Christina Galitsky, 33

Articles — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:01:00 -0400

Back in graduate school, Christina Galitsky could boil her life’s work down into something like the title of a journal article: "The reversibility of proteins absorbing onto a surface," she says. But since she dropped off the Ph.D. track and, later, took a job up the hill at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the question "What do you do?" has turned into a stumper. "I guess now I say, I try and work on ... sort of innovative solutions to ... wait, what do I say?" she says with a laugh.

Officially, Galitsky spends about two-thirds of her time developing tools to… more

Counseling Kids to Graduation and Beyond

Articles — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:23:00 -0400

In all the talk about education reform, school counselors seldom come up. Maybe that’s because adults tend to do the talking.

A privately funded after-school program in Oakland called Kids First has spent the last couple of years coordinating youth-led research projects to figure out why kids in their city believe that dropout rates are so high and college admissions so rare. To the surprise of the group’s adult organizers, the No. 1 issue that kids identified was bad or nonexistent counseling.

The Kids First students said they had trouble making sense of graduation requirements -- especially the transfer students, who can… more

Volunteer on the Road

Articles — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 23:19:00 -0400

Generally speaking, you don’t want a crowbar or a wheelbarrow to feature prominently in your vacation photos. Or rubble. Or poverty (unless, perhaps, it is the exotic kind -- a shoeless boy with oil-black hair; a woman carrying vegetables to the market). But that is just the kind of experience Daniel Johnson sought out earlier this year when he organized a trip to coastal Mississippi with a few dozen officemates from Credit Suisse New York. "All along Route 10, from New Orleans, you could see the devastation," the 45-year-old managing director recalls. And then there was Biloxi: "It was run… more

The Laptop Crusade

Articles — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:19:27 -0400

Yves Béhar sits at a wide worktable on the lofted second floor of fuseproject, his San Francisco design studio, surrounded by windows and whiteboards and nearly a dozen foam laptops. He is tall and tan, with a surfer’s mess of curls and the quiet, easy manner of someone who just woke up from a nap. “There are two types of projects,” he says. “There are the stylist projects -- the ones you sign with your signature. Then there are the ones that are going to be difficult.” He looks at his pile of discarded ideas, none of them much alike,… more

Behind the Bars

Articles — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:33:00 -0400

Prison design is about as unglamorous as architecture can get. Corrections agencies want the cheapest cage they can buy; communities want the monstrosities out of sight. Innovation has typically meant anything that will cut costs -- for instance, casting an entire prefabricated cell, from the bed frame to the toilet, as a single piece of low-grade concrete. But when British nonprofit Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) approached the architect Will Alsop about designing a concept prison -- from the inside out -- he jumped at the chance. If prisons are meant to make troubled men and women into citizens, he… more

Do the Right Thing

Articles — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 00:04:00 -0400

Ben Goldhirsh is zipped into his wetsuit, at the wheel of a cluttered old Ford. He pulls into the parking lot at Topanga Beach, kills the ignition and checks the surf. "Do you know Biggie’s 10 Crack Commandments?" he asks. (That’s the Notorious B.I.G.) "Interestingly enough, a lot of the life lessons my dad tried to pass on to me bear a striking similarity to Biggie’s 10 Crack Commandments." He laughs, a little uncomfortably. "Rule No. 1 is never let anyone know how much money you have."

I had asked about money, because Ben is getting a reputation in Hollywood… more

Ready or Not?

Articles — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 16:20:02 -0400

Victor slouches into a bustling courtroom at Los Angeles County Children's Court. He would be tall, if he stood up straight, and broad, if his shoulders didn't follow his eyes to the floor. He doesn't look sullen or defiant. He just looks like a big kid, humble and out of place in this room full of busy grown-ups. When the judge glances up from her papers and smiles at him, he smiles back, just a bit.

At 19, Victor has already lived a life that takes a few tellings to get straight. His father has been in prison.… more

Lost in America

Articles — Tue, 02 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Christina is a modern, multitasking, American 15-year-old -- fiddling with her new iPod, sassing the tall boy slouched beside her, and getting an impromptu lesson in Filipino culture at an after-school program in Oakland, California. "I speak Tagalog and Filipino," says the group's counselor, Michelle Ferrer, "two languages from the island where my family comes from." Christina is puzzled. "The Philippines is an island?" she asks skeptically. Ferrer nods and Christina frowns. "I thought it was in China," she says. Ferrer tries not to laugh. "Girl, you thought I was Chinese?" she teases gently. "No," Christina clarifies, "I thought the… more

The Invisibles

Articles — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 05:00:00 -0400

"I'll be there in five minutes," Thi says.

If you spend any time around college students, you expect this kind of phone call -- and you know it really means 15 minutes, maybe 20. But sure enough, five minutes later, I spot Thi hustling up the sidewalk from UCLA's main library, a stuffed messenger bag swinging at her side. She is wearing dark, low-cut jeans, retro sneakers and a trim, arty T-shirt with big aviators hanging from the collar. "Hey," she says, a little out of breath. She is pretty and record-store cool, with heavy black hair that falls across… more

Shift Work

Articles — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 04:00:00 -0500

Just an hour from San Francisco, on the road to Fresno, a rancher has sheared a giant cross, and the words "Jesus Saves," into a grassy hillside. A little farther south, a National Rifle Association banner billows from a long truck bed, parked by the side of Route 99 until harvest time. Away from California's big cities and the cool Pacific coast lies a flat, fertile landscape that's politically more like Indiana than Marin County. Here, in California's Central Valley, U.S. citizens and illegal, undocumented immigrants have lived in a kind of awkward partnership for decades. As they do business… more

A Card We Should All Carry

Articles — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

As states get ready to comply with a law passed last May and roll out Real IDs (think 50 flavors of enhanced drivers' licenses that will also, for lack of anything more suitable, regulate access to airplanes, bars and banks), it might be time to consider a national identification card. Unfortunately, two camps own the conversation.

Security heavies and cultural conservatives say a national ID is necessary to protect us from Islamic terrorists and illegal immigrants. Libertarians and government-wary leftists fret about privacy. Progressives and moderates have never shown much enthusiasm for the debate. But there are lots of reasons… more

After Shock

Articles — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 03:00:00 -0400

Before a storm sank New Orleans and a pair of Boeing 767s gored the Twin Towers, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) drew up a list. It escaped notice in the months of second-guessing after the September 11 attacks but took on an air of prophecy within hours of Hurricane Katrina's landfall. There were three disasters, FEMA managers concluded at an August 2001 training session, that Americans should beware above all others: a terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake near San Francisco. Four years later, it's two down, one to… more

SUV Redemption Sticker

Articles — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 06:00:00 -0400

In Washington, DC, eco-vandals smear SUV door handles with dog crap. In Santa Cruz, California, protestors tag more than 60 gas-guzzlers with anti-oil graffiti. In Los Angeles, a Caltech grad student is sentenced to eight years in prison for trashing more than 120 SUVs around the city. It's almost enough to make you feel bad for SUV drivers. After all, some of them are green, too -- just not as hardcore about it.

Now they have TerraPass, a clever eco-capitalism experiment. Launched by a group of Wharton Business School classmates, the startup sells a decal that drivers can slap on… more

The Bitter Pill

Articles — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

At 28, Joe has become something of an expert at heroin detox -- he's tried it nine times. Between programs, he's attempted to quit on his own. Once, when the cravings got the best of him, he tried to knock himself out by hitting his head against a brick wall. So late last year, when Joe checked himself into a New York outpost of Phoenix House, the country's largest residential rehab program, he knew exactly what to expect: the plastic cups of methadone to wear down his dependence, the sedated days and sleepless nights, the chill of the toilet seat,… more