Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a H…

archived 10 Jul 2025 23:27:06 UTC

Do we actually know how to make cities safer for women?

Women-only buses, catcalling fines and gender-sensitive design — we've tried them all.

Americans’ love affair with big cars is killing them

New analysis shows that the heaviest vehicles kill more people than they save in crashes

Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters

This essay has been drawn from Vol. 1 No. 4 of the American Reader, available here. Our October 2012 interview with Veselka can be found here.

Killing someone with a car costs $1.6 million. California requires drivers to carry $30,000

NHTSA puts the average economic cost of a traffic fatality at $1.6 million. California requires a driver to carry $30,000 in bodily injury coverage, and everyone who was not in the crash pays the rest.

Backseat Software

What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:

Write As If You’re Already Dead.

It was Saturday night, and I was stuck in traffic. Both sides of the freeway were tightly packed with cars — if Los Angeles was a literal…

These Ukrainian women survived a massacre. Now, they're shooting down Russian drones

Women from a Kyiv suburb traumatized by a 2022 massacre by Russian troops joined an all-female volunteer air defense unit to deal with their fears.

Traps

The story of four very different women whose paths inte…

Helsinki, Finland's Amazing Traffic Safety Record, Explained

The Nordic nation’s rate of vehicle fatalities is a fraction of the toll in the US, despite a harsh climate and ice-covered streets. Here’s how the Finns do traffic safety.

The Modern Moloch

On the streets of early 20th-century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside and play in the streets,” all day. And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year. Much of the public viewed the car as a death machine.

Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone (Published 2005)

Supreme Court rules that police do not have constitutional duty to protect person from harm, even woman who obtained court-issued protective order against violent husband which made arrest mandatory for violation; decision overturns ruling by federal appeals court in Colorado; it had permitted lawsuit to proceed against town of Castle Rock, whose police failed to respond to woman's pleas for help after her estranged husband violated protective order by kidnapping their three children, whom he eventually killed; in another ruling, Supreme Court rebukes US Court of Appeals in Cincinnati for reopening death penalty appeal, on basis of newly discovered evidence, after Supreme Court had ruled on matter; 5-to-4 decision involves convicted murderer Gregory Thompson (M)

Construction worker killed in Baridhara crash: Teen was at the wheel, another charged in case

Mehedi Hasan (24), a construction worker was sitting on a footpath taking a rest when a speeding private car veered off the road and struck him. Mehedi was crushed under the car's wheels and died at the scene. Following the accident, people at the spot detained a teenager who was in the driver's seat. Police later took him into custody but released him after questioning.

Women in tech and finance at higher risk from AI job losses, report says

‘Mid-career’ female workers also being sidelined by rigid hiring processes, says City of London Corporation