The average life expectancy in the U.S. is 79, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but that average ranges drastically — from the mid-50s to the mid-90s — based on where people live. A new model called the “universal basic neighborhood” aims to help people in all communities maintain an average life expectancy of at least 80 by spreading health across neighborhoods rather than concentrating it in a few pockets.

On a summer morning in Louisville in 1965, the Ohio River carried an unbearable message. The body of Alberta Odell Jones—34 years old, a prominent Black attorney, and Louisville’s first female prosecutor—was found floating near Fontaine Ferry Park. In the blunt language of police work and bureaucratic recordkeeping, her death would be categorized, revisited, argued over, and filed away. In the lived language of the city she served, it landed as something else: a warning flare and a void, the sudden removal of a person who had been building Black political power with the unglamorous tools of law and electoral mechanics.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops brought music that had been forgotten and even looked down upon into the rarefied world of art music—the country mouse ushered from dusty backwoods to the velvet seats of the city mouse’s concert hall. While at first listen the Carolina Chocolate Drops might sound like a scratchy field recording from the wanderings of Alan Lomax, their collective musicianship and charisma gained them enthusiastic audiences who knew little or nothing of the well from which they were drawing.