Studies across the United States show that what ends up on forms about the deceased is often inaccurate.

New York City, in the early aughts, had one of the highest rates of heart disease deaths in the nation. Nearly 40 percent of deaths there were attributed officially to heart disease, according to Bob Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics.

But the statistic didn’t align with New York’s risk factors for heart disease — most notably, smoking, obesity and high blood pressure — which should’ve put the city at or below the 2003 national average of roughly 28 percent. So the NYC Health Department launched a validation study of death certificates across the area’s 70 hospitals in 2010. It found a 91 percent overreporting of coronary heart disease (CHD) as the cause of death.

Finding mistakes on death certificates is not just a New York City problem — it’s widespread. In fact, according to various studies, roughly a third of U.S. death certificates include an inaccurate cause of death.

Karin Housley’s long-shot bid to turn Minnesota red is the end of a winding career transformation.

The belated political awakening for Karin Housley arrived in the tea party heyday of Tax Day 2010. She’d already transformed from TV news producer (“back when it was real news,” she’s quick to clarify) to nomadic pro hockey wife — her husband, Hockey Hall of Famer and current Buffalo Sabres head coach Phil Housley, played for eight NHL teams during a 21-year career — to full-time proprietor of Karin Housley Homes, a high-end real estate agency in the Twin Cities’ northeast suburbs.

“It was frustrating to see the direction our government was going, to see where my tax dollars were going,” Housley says. No stranger to moving, she seriously considered leaving her beloved home state for somewhere with lower taxes and lighter regulation. 

In a cozy seating area along the far wall of the open-plan office suite for her campaign for U.S. Senate, she recounts how her kids talked her out of it — and set her on a life-changing course with a simple message: “Mom, you always told us when you’re mad about something, you do something about it. So, what are you going to do about it?” Her answer: Change things from the inside. Housley lost a close race for state Senate that year, then won two years later in a more favorably drawn district. In 2016, she won re-election by 23 percentage points.

James Forten was not only exceedingly wealthy, he helped galvanize America’s anti-slavery movement.

In the spring of 1842, several thousand Philadelphians poured into the streets for one of the largest funerals in the city’s history. It was a remarkable sight: An interracial procession that included everyone from poor Black laborers to wealthy White merchants to sea captains and shippers. On that March day in Philadelphia, one observer wrote, “complexional distinctions and prejudices seemed … forgotten.” One visitor from Great Britain, who happened to be in the city that day, was awestruck by the integrated funeral. He inquired of the deceased, “Who was this man?”

That man, James Forten, had lived a life in early America that was hard for many in his time, or even for us in retrospect, to imagine. In an era in which Black people in America were oppressed and many enslaved, Forten managed to beat the odds to become a rich sailmaker and amass a large personal fortune