Journalist Claudia Kolker

I Never Lose My Fountain Pen

Claudia Kolker is an award-winning journalist and the editor of Rice Business Wisdom, the ideas magazine at Rice Business School and author of The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers To America About Health, Happiness and Hope. Based in Houston, she previously has reported from Mexico, El Salvador, the Caribbean, Japan, and India. Before joining the panel at a Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event, “How Are Immigrants Changing Our Definition of Health?” at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco, she talked in the green room about Houston, …

CALmatters Health Journalist Elizabeth Aguilera

The Strangest, Most Surreal Place Was New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina

Elizabeth Aguilera is an award-winning multimedia journalist who covers health and social services for CALmatters. Previously, she produced stories about community health for Southern California Public Radio/KPCC 89.3, where her …

UCLA Medical Anthropologist Marjorie Kagawa-Singer

The Five Stages of Grief Don’t Always Apply

Marjorie Kagawa-Singer is a medical anthropologist at UCLA. In a 45-year career working as a clinician and a researcher, she has focused on reducing health disparities and identifying cultural processes …

The Healthiest Californians Are the Ones Who Are Healthy Together

Immigrants Live Longer and Better Than the Native Born Because Community Heals in Ways Medicine Does Not

Immigrants bring cultural practices that could improve our health systems and the health of all Californians—if we do more to understand and deploy the advantages of cultural diversity, said a …

How Mexican Immigrants Changed the Way Americans Grieve

With Sugar Skulls and Altars that Maintain Our Connection to the Dead, Día de los Muertos Is Now a Therapeutic Ritual in All 50 States

After decades of avoiding the topic, it has become fashionable for Americans to talk about death.

Death dinners and death cafes offer people space to collectively discuss the physical, psychological, …

Are Immigrants California’s Secret to Healthy Living?

From Sushi to Sriracha to Schwarzenegger, Newcomers Have Redefined the Good Life

What makes California the very picture of healthy living? It’s neither sunshine nor silicone implants.

Our health secret is actually immigration.

While the President and others falsely blame immigrants for being sources …