Rural-urban disparities in cancer outcomes recede for patients enrolled in clinical trials, a new study in JAMA Network Open finds.
Big cities dominate America’s cultural consciousness in ways that the countryside — amber waves of grain notwithstanding — can only dream of: Manhattan skyscrapers, L.A. movie stars and Chicago’s “big shoulders,” as Carl Sandburg put it in his 1916 poem. Cities can have political power, too, embodied by recently departed but long-serving mayors such as Boston’s Thomas Menino (21 years), Chicago’s Richard M. Daley (22 years) and New York’s Michael Bloomberg (12 years).
Land use in the United States has always been marked by change — forest has become cropland and then returned again; towns have grown in rural areas only to disappear; cities have grown, suburbs have spread. In the last 25 years, however, change has accelerated in ways that depart from previous trends, even as the stakes have gotten higher — land use can have real effects on climate change, wildlife habitat and now even energy production.
U.S. inner-city schools often receive the lion’s share of attention from education reformers and charter school founders, but rural schools educate up to a third of America’s public school students and face challenges just as daunting as their urban counterparts.
