Maya Cederlund

Amy Eickhoff says the charter buses that idle outside her 62-floor building spew fumes so noxious that people living there avoid going out on their balconies.“All those fumes do is go right up the side of the building like a chimney,” said Eickhoff, who for 14 years has been the building manager at 340 On The Park, a downtown Chicago luxury residential tower. “If you were sitting on your balcony trying to enjoy the beautiful view of Maggie Daley Park or Grant Park, you’re smelling that odor for...

Tornado season is ramping up in the Midwest. Residents in and around Missouri's Kansas City metro area hold faith in an urban legend called the "Tonganoxie Split" that is said to spare the city from tornadoes. And scientists are split about its accuracy.

KCUR's Maya Cederlund reports.

Nyah Mway’s framed eighth grade graduation certificate sits at the side entrance of the Buddha Dama Thuka Temple, propped above a party speaker that emits colorful lights. This was the Mway family’s parish, where Nyah danced and played pool on the weekends with other teenagers.Nyah graduated from Donovan Middle School on June 27, 2024. The next day, Utica Police Department Officer Patrick Husnay shot him in the street, a single bullet to the chest.In the year since, Utica’s t...

Rita Bennett remembers the day a twister ripped through Topeka, Kansas, like it was yesterday. Bennett, her mother, father and grandmother were returning from a grocery run in north Topeka, when the sirens went off. She and her family went to her aunt’s home and sheltered under tables in the basement corner.Bennett, who was about to turn 10 years old at the time, got separated from her parents in the basement. She remembers desperately grasping for her father’s hand, but he was just out of reach...

When Melissa Howell’s former professor made sexual and romantic advances toward her on WhatsApp, she brought it to American University’s Office of Equity and Title IX, assuming that it would be what she described as a cut-and-dry case.

Instead, for several months, the Office gave her the impression that it was interested in pursuing an investigation, only to tell her that her professor’s actions did not violate AU’s Title IX policy.

Cosette Eisenhauer-Epp, a Chinese transracial adoptee with white parents, said she remembers a salient moment after the March 2022 Atlanta-area spa shootings.

“The people he shot look like me, but he’s the same ethnicity as my parents, so where do I go from that?” said Eisenhauer-Epp, a 23-year-old master’s student at the University of Texas at Arlington.

For Eisenhauer-Epp, the shootings were just another reminder of how complicated it was navigating her identity as an adoptee.