Lake Effect

Even in a normal year, the holidays can be stressful. This year health officials are recommending people who were planning to gather or travel for Thanksgiving stay home to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

For many of us this has been a year of sacrifice and family time might be exactly what we’re craving right now. As important as it is to show our loved ones that we are thinking of them, it’s equally as crucial to take care of our own mental and physical health.

It’s become common in Wisconsin for school districts to go directly to voters to ask for increased property tax funding. These school referendums have seen high approval rates in recent years.

You might think that the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic devastation would reverse the trend, but that is not what has happened this year.

Although 2020 has been a year unlike any that has come before it, there has been a lot of time spent drawing parallels to the past. Many have compared the COVID-19 pandemic to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.

Others have looked at the year 1968, when a contentious presidential campaign season turned violent and protests over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted around the nation. These protests were aided by musicians, whose songs have become an iconic legacy of the era.

The city of Wauwatosa will pay officer Joseph Mensah the equivalent of 13 months pay plus an additional $15,000, along with what he is owed for vacation and sick time amongst other benefits once his resignation becomes official at the end of the month.

The United States has now lost 250,000 people to COVID-19. Our case numbers in Wisconsin continue to rise as our healthcare systems remained strained, and a difficult winter is ahead of us.

During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” sought to ease the pain of many Americans and put them back to work. His Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed millions of Americans to rebuild essential infrastructure like parks, roads, and housing.

But the vast majority of these jobs went to unskilled men and most opportunities for women required an education. A program here in Milwaukee worked to change that. The Milwaukee Handicrafts Project hired unskilled women to mend text books, build furniture and sew dolls, among other things.

Election Day was more than two weeks ago, the vote tally took longer than a normal year because a record number of people voted by mail. Yet once the votes were in, former Vice President Joe Biden was projected the winner, but President Donald Trump has not conceded.

The election results will be made official after two final steps in the election process. Each state needs to certify their results and the popular vote gets turned into the electoral vote. Once that’s complete, Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes can be cast.

History can sometimes feel like a dry topic. A world made up of men in white wigs and pressed coats making important and dispassionate decisions.

In reality, there have always been scandals that have shaped our collective history – including here in Wisconsin. Author Anna Lardinois writes about many of these defining moments in her new book, “Storied & Scandalous Wisconsin: A History of Mischief and Menace, Hero and Heartbreak”.

In normal times, Lake Effect features a variety of in-studio performances from local musicians and artists. But of course, these are not normal times. Most live events have been cancelled and recording music in isolation presents a lot of challenges — which is why we’ve been featuring these artists in a series we call Pandemic Performers.

One of the defining issues in the latter days of President Trump’s presidential campaign was low-income housing. The president claimed that President-elect Joe Biden would force suburban communities to build low-income housing, which Trump claimed would bring crime and lower home values.

Half of Wisconsin is covered in forests, so managing all that land is no easy task. It’s up to the Wisconsin Division of Forestry, which falls under the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), to keep the land healthy.

The forestry division works with federal, county, tribal and private landowners. It’s a team of about 420 people scattered across the state. And, the person leading this division is Heather Berklund.  

The pandemic has taken a toll on every aspect of our lives. We’re all experiencing a level of uncertainty that impacts our mental health, our relationships, and our work.

Cases of COVID-19 are at a record high in Wisconsin. Over the past month, the state has become one of the nation’s leading hotspots for new infections, and the surge isn’t showing any signs of slowing.

As more and more people are being sickened, our hospitals are becoming overburdened with patients. And if infections don’t start to level off, hospitals could run out of resources — threatening the health and safety of Wisconsinites statewide.

WUWM has been partnering with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee PBS and the Milwaukee Public Library on an initiative called Listen MKE. 

The latest event focused on the need for mentorship for young Black and brown people in Milwaukee. The conversation was hosted by James Causey from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and took place last Thursday on Facebook live. 

Watch the full Listen MKE below:

Throughout the history of our nation, outgoing presidential candidates have set aside party differences to accept the result of elections — even contentious ones.

President Donald Trump, so far, has not conceded to President-elect Joe Biden and continues to fight the results of the election. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have failed to say that they’ll accept the will of the voters. The president began making those statements months before people went to the polls.

Living with trauma and injustice is undoubtedly difficult. Those living with these experiences find different ways of overcoming them, and one way is through art and writing. That’s what the Milwaukee exhibit Rise and Thrive: A Lives in Landscape series is all about.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the latest Republican challenge to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. This has been another chapter in America’s ongoing red-versus-blue battle in trying to shape the way we deliver and pay for health care. 

In 2020, Latinos became the largest minority voting bloc in the United States. To put that into perspective, a young Latino turns 18 every 30 seconds. And as votes were tabulated last week, the power of the Latino vote was demonstrated.

It both gave President Donald Trump the numbers to win Florida and President-elect Joe Biden the numbers to flip a historically red state like Arizona.

As the nation takes time to celebrate the women and men who have served in our armed forces this Veterans Day, a local initiative is working toward better serving the medical needs of this community.

The “My Life, My Story” initiative at the Milwaukee VA Medical Center is asking veterans to share stories they find important with their health care providers. The idea is that by sharing these stories, health care workers can empathize with veterans and better understand their medical needs.

There are many revered Black authors in American literature – Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes to name a few. Their work is often centered on the Black American experience, which can often be defined by oppression.

Even before President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election, President Donald Trump began claiming there was fraud. These claims haven't been backed up by any evidence, but that hasn’t stopped other Republicans from siding with these claims and announcing investigations.

A new book of poems from DeWitt Clinton takes inspiration from a translation of Chinese poems, placing them in a contemporary landscape of Milwaukee. In his new book called By A Lake Near A Moon, Fishing With The Chinese Masters he explores loss and his time as a soldier in Vietnam. 

In September, Joan Johnson was confirmed as Milwaukee Public Library (MPL) director and city librarian by Mayor Tom Barrett and the Milwaukee Common Council. Johnson served as the deputy director of the MPL since March of 2009 and has been with the system since 2006.

Johnson is the 12th director in MPL’s 142-year-history, the fourth woman to serve in this position and the first Black person to lead MPL. She's taken on her new role during the coronavirus pandemic, which has presented many new challenges to the library system.

Interactions with strangers are few and far between in the time of COVID-19. Following social distancing guidelines and wearing a mask aren’t exactly conducive to positive interactions at the grocery store or the post office.

But essayist Mary Steinert-Ng had one of those interactions recently while trying to send mail to her daughter. She talks about it and her gratitude for those working through the pandemic in her essay “Care Package.”

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to reach new heights in Wisconsin. For the first time, the seven-day average of infections has reached 5,000 people. That’s more than a 500% increase from just a couple of months ago. Hospitalizations have soared as community spread has allowed the disease to infect and kill vulnerable people.

Starting college is a time when new connections and friendships are forged. For many freshmen, it’s also their first time living alone and navigating the world independently. But this fall semester looks a bit different for college freshmen in Wisconsin and throughout the country.

Four southeast Wisconsin colleges have made an ambitious pledge: to close racial and income-based graduation gaps within the next 10 years.

While official election results are still being tabulated, we do know a little more about voter turnout. Milwaukeeans and Wisconsinites alike showed up at the polls in droves — by mail, through early voting and on Election Day.

As election night stretched into the early morning of Nov. 4, the election results in Wisconsin began to shift. It was something that many election observers expected: in-person voting, generally counted first, would favor President Donald Trump. Mail-in voting, counted later, would favor former Vice President Joe Biden. 

But as the tide began to turn in favor of Biden, prominent Republicans, including Trump, began making claims of fraud. These claims run the gamut from basic misunderstandings of how elections are conducted in Wisconsin to outright conspiracy theories. 

While many Americans are focused on election results, the coronavirus continues to infect people at an alarming rate. Wisconsin has seen one of the largest increases of cases in the country, breaking infection and death records on a near-daily basis.