J. Scott Applewhite/AP

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner (c.) and his attorney Abbe Lowell (r.) depart Capitol Hill in Washington on Monday, July 24, 2017. He was there for a closed-door interview with Senate Intelligence Committee investigators looking into Russia's election meddling and possible ties to the Trump administration.

The Russia controversy – one of the most defining issues of Donald Trump’s young presidency – has been cast by the president and his supporters as a political “witch hunt,” even while Democrats are all over the news talk shows raising serious questions.

But strip away the political and media noise, and what is left is a Congress where both Republicans and Democrats appear resolved to keep Russia in check – even if that means crossing the president. In fact, observers say this Congress is the most hard-line against Moscow in decades, mostly because Russia’s attempts to influence last year’s US elections are too close to home to ignore.

“When we feel like we’re threatened, and certainly our elections and our cybersecurity are threatened, we go shoulder-to-shoulder,” Sen. David Perdue (R) of Georgia, one of the president’s closest allies in the Senate, told the Monitor last week.

That’s not to say that Congress is acting like a monolith on this issue. The path to sanctions against Russia has been rockier in the House than in the Senate. But this week the House is expected to pass revised sanctions legislation against Russia, after breaking a logjam over a bill that sped through the Senate last month with a near unanimous vote of 98-2.

At the same time, congressional attention is turning to the president’s former campaign manager and family members, including son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner. Mr. Kushner appeared Monday at a closed hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is investigating Russia’s attempt to influence last year’s election and any possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia over the election.

In a written statement released Monday morning, Kushner said: “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government.” He characterized his contacts with Russia or Russian representatives as minimal and himself as a political novice, flooded by e-mails and other communications in a swiftly moving campaign and transition period.

Kushner described the infamous June 2016 meeting that included himself, Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, and a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, as “a waste of our time” – so much so, he said, that he emailed an assistant to call his cell phone so he would have an excuse to leave.

Emails from a British publicist to Mr. Trump Jr. show the meeting was originally set up to offer damaging information on Hillary Clinton from Ms. Veselnitskaya, but Kushner’s written account says he read only that part of an email chain from his brother-in-law that announced a time change for the meeting. “Documents confirm my memory that this was calendared as ‘Meeting: Don Jr.| Jared Kushner.’ No one else was mentioned.”

Kushner, who expressed “gratitude” to be able to provide his version of events, will also appear in a private hearing before the House intelligence committee Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee, under the chairmanship of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) of Iowa, is also negotiating with Trump Jr. and Mr. Manafort to have them appear before the committee.

“It is striking that we’ve got bipartisan, sustained leadership on both the Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee in continuing to pursue investigations,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware, a member of the Judiciary Committee, in a brief interview last week. “It is not as divisive as may superficially seem to be the case.”

‘Unprecedentedly hostile’ toward Russia

Paul Saunders, a former State Department official in the George W. Bush administration, describes US-Russia relations as the worst they’ve been since the early 1980s, when former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were in power amid mounting concern about a possible military confrontation in Europe.

The worry today is more over Russian cyberattacks and political interference than a hot war, he says, but in the '80s, the feeling was that relations could improve. Today, the expectation is they may well get worse.

“Attitudes toward Russia on Capitol Hill are unprecedentedly hostile,” says Mr. Saunders, a Russia expert at the Center for the National Interest in Washington. He attributes this “primarily to anger over Russia’s interference in the election.”

The White House, which is trying to improve relations with Russia, objected to the Senate sanctions bill, saying it handcuffs the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy – not an unusual complaint for a commander in chief. The bill got bogged down in the House over procedural and policy issues, with plenty of political accusations to go around.

But a revised version emerged over the weekend that was worked out with lawmakers from both parties and both chambers. The bill has been adjusted to meet some US business complaints and has added sanctions against North Korea to a package that already included sanctions against Russia and Iran.

It would still, however, make it very difficult for the president to overturn sanctions without congressional approval. The new sanctions against Russia would punish it for its meddling in US elections, its military actions in eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, and human rights abuses.

How the parties have switched stances

Notably, the politics over Russia has “totally flipped on its head” from the cold war days, says Jeffrey Mankoff, a Russia specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Democrats have become more hawkish and vocal, demanding more congressional oversight of the Trump administration vis-à-vis Russia from the Republican-controlled Congress. They point to a lack of independence from the White House on Russia that caused then-House intelligence chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R) of California, to hand his committee gavel over to Rep. Mike Conaway (R) of Texas, earlier this year.

“I mean, where are the heroic figures like we had in Watergate?” says Rep. Gerry Connolly (D) of Virginia. (Editor's note: The congressman's quote has been corrected from an earlier version.)

Many Republicans attribute the drip, drip, drip of bad news on possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to media hype, Democratic histrionics, and neophytes in the White House with poor record-keeping and minimal understanding of government – political bumpkins, perhaps, but not criminals. Neither do many of their voters think Russia should be a top concern.

“My state overwhelmingly supports Donald Trump,” said Rep. Mo Brooks (R) of Alabama, when asked by reporters whether the stories about Trump Jr.’s meeting were becoming a distraction. Russia is just one of “thousands upon thousands of issues” in his state, he said, and is viewed that way. Still, Congressman Brooks, a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, supports sanctions against Russia.

In a brief interview with the Monitor, Senate intelligence chairman Richard Burr (R) of North Carolina said that the news churn and politicization of Russia were not affecting the bipartisan nature of his committee’s work – though he did admit that “the public nature of some of the statements makes it a little more difficult for us to get the witnesses that we need and to do it in the privacy that we’d like.”

While the committee’s ranking member, Democrat Mark Warner (D) of Virginia, is a regular on the talk shows, Chairman Burr says he chose “a different route” when he started the investigation. He doesn’t do sit-down television interviews nor does he go over to the White House, because he wants to avoid any appearance of outside influence. 

Indeed, on this day last week, when almost all of his GOP Senate colleagues were at the White House being pressed by the president to pass a health-care bill, Burr was ordering take-out from the Senate's basement café.

“I have to stay as open as I possibly can,” he says about the investigation, holding onto his lunch. “We’re going to follow this through wherever the intelligence leads us.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Displaced families live by a road in a drought-affected area on the outskirts of Melkaselah Village, Somali Region, Ethiopia. After three failed spring rain seasons, this region in the southeast of the country is experiencing extreme drought. The government, NGO's, UN agencies and private groups are coordinating to provide aid and assistance to those affected to prevent a famine.

Battered by drought and civil wars, more than 20 million people from Yemen to Tanzania are at risk of starvation in what aid workers call the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. But over the past two decades, nations that once produced searing images of famine's toll have moved to thwart it by strengthening community resilience. Our reporters traveled to Madagascar, Ethiopia, and Somaliland to investigate the daunting challenges as well as the long-term efforts that are saving lives. 

Addis Ababa is hungry. These days, Ethiopia’s capital seems to need more of almost everything: land for factories, shopping malls and highways; steel and concrete to build new skyscrapers; lanky rods of eucalyptus to scaffold their skeletons as they rise. Addis needs more roads, schools, houses, and cars. It needs apartment buildings for its migrants, and five-star hotels for the unending parade of diplomats attending African Union meetings in the glossy new Chinese-bankrolled headquarters at the center of town. The city fills out and up, seemingly insatiable, nibbling into surrounding farmland and poking higher and higher into the smoggy highland sky.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Vehicles pass through Meskel Square beside the elevated tracks of the modern light rail in downtown Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the capital of one of the world's faster-growing economies.

Six hundred miles to the southeast, meanwhile, Ethiopia’s Somali region is hungry, too – or more accurately, it is thirsty. It hasn’t rained here – at least, not enough – in more than a year, and more rain isn’t expected until October. It’s already been long enough that grazing lands have grown huge bald spots, and intake at pediatric malnutrition wards has doubled. It’s long enough that ribs ripple visibly beneath the skin of those few cows and camels that have survived, and long enough to leave thousands of young people stranded in romantic purgatory: engaged, in love, but without the money to pay yarad, the traditional Somali bride price.

Unlike in Addis, where old Soviet Ladas jostle for space with high-end SUVs on traffic-clogged streets, practically the only vehicles on the roads here are ancient, bug-eyed Mercedes cargo trucks carting water and food aid into remote towns. This is the second severe drought to hit the country in three years, and government and humanitarian agencies estimate that nearly 8 million Ethiopians are currently in urgent need of humanitarian assistance – a figure that is expected to grow amid the dry season, which began in July.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

"I'm 80 years old and I'm telling you that I have never seen a drought like this before," says Abdullahi Abdi, a resident of Melkaselah, a windswept village in the Somali Region. "It has not rained here in 22 days."

“I’m 80 years old and I’m telling you that I have never seen a drought like this before,” says Abdullahi Abdi, a resident of a windswept Somali region village called Melkaselah, resting his orange henna-tinted beard on a walking stick. It has not rained here in 22 days, he says, at a time of year when the rains should come two or three times a week. “All of our livestock are gone.”

For decades, Ethiopia was synonymous in many Westerners’ minds with scenes like this one, the kind splashed across the world’s front pages during the infamous famines of the 1970s and ‘80s and immortalized in pop music by the cringe-worthy “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (Suffice to say, in one of the world’s oldest Christian societies, they probably did.)

But now, Ethiopia’s image looks a lot more like its capital city: gleaming, cosmopolitan, and boldly aspirational. Although still a nation of farmers, for the past decade, this has been among the world’s fastest growing economies. It has used that brisk development to slash illiteracy, disease, and extreme poverty – though by methods undemocratic and at times aggressively repressive.

And if Ethiopia was once the world’s poster child for drought mismanagement, it is now the regional model for early warning and nimble response. As two of the worst droughts in recorded history have swept across the country, a muscular, government-led reaction has driven back the crisis to mostly manageable levels – even as in neighboring South Sudan and Somalia, the same weather conditions have brought populations to the edge of famine.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A shepherd herds his camels in search of water in Kebridhar, in Ethiopia's Somali Region. In this pastoral region, where livestock are considered wealth, many families have lost all their animals to the drought.

“The drought [of 2015-16] was at least as bad as the drought in the mid-1980s,” says Stein Holden, a professor of development and resource economics in the School of Economics and Business at Norwegian University of Life Sciences, referring to the first of the country’s two recent droughts, which ended last year (the second, in the southern Somali region, is still ongoing). “But because the country is much economically stronger and more stable now it’s been able to provide a lot of the aid itself, without outside intervention.”

Improvement – under pressure

In 2016, indeed, the government of Ethiopia funneled more than $700 million of its own money into drought relief efforts – close to half the total global money that went to the relief effort. It has a standing department for managing natural disasters and amasses thick stacks of weather data from satellites, farmers, and forecasters to predict when the weather may turn again.

The 8 million poorest Ethiopians, meanwhile, benefit from an innovative public welfare system that parcels out small amounts of cash or food during the leanest six months of the year in return for labor in local public works projects: building schools and clinics, fixing roads, digging wells.

“We aren’t just given that money – we work for it,” says Bashir Abdi, a herder in the Shabelle Zone of Somali region, jabbing his finger toward a nearby berkad, a shallow concrete pool used to collect rainwater for the village, that he and others here dug as part of their Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) work a few years ago. Such projects are part of a vast network of infrastructure – including nearly 25,000 miles of new roads, 500 clinics, and 4,300 school rooms – that the PSNP’s beneficiaries have built since the program began in 2005.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Women collect their family's ration of water from a cement birkhad, a shallow concrete pool used to collect rainwater for the village, that is filled every day with water from a Save the Children truck.

And though families receive an almost vanishingly small sum of cash – as little as $10 per month per person – the program has been responsible for cutting poverty in the country by 2 percent, according to data from the World Bank, which co-finances the project.

“The system Ethiopia has is spectacular,” says Kelly Johnson, a senior social protection specialist with the World Bank who advises the Ethiopian government on the PSNP. “It has reached a point where it is beginning to serve as a model for other programs in Africa and around the world.” 

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

But Ethiopia’s success story is not a simple one. The government keeps a white-knuckled grip on the media and political dissidents, and patrols the boundaries of the country’s glittering new image carefully. Since political protests broke out in the country in late 2015, more than 500 demonstrators have died, tens of thousands have been arrested, and the country has been placed under a draconian “state of emergency” that, among other things, limits freedom of assembly and speech, and bars certain forms of social media. Journalists are routinely detained or arrested and accused of provoking unrest with critical coverage. (On a recent visit, Christian Science Monitor reporters were assigned a minder to observe their coverage of the drought response.)

International aid groups, meanwhile, speak delicately of past “food crises” (never famines) and outbreaks of “acute watery diarrhea” (never cholera, a more serious diagnosis), careful to avoid offending government overseers who could cut off their access to needy communities. Officials at a hospital in the Somali region visited by The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, said they had evidence that an outbreak of cholera had begun in the area – despite the government’s refusal to confirm this.

“[The government] doesn’t always ask for help in time – their early warning systems are good, but the decision-makers don’t always want to listen,” says an aid worker here who asked not to be identified because of his organization’s ties to the government. There is heavy pressure, he says, to keep international eyes off of situations that could tarnish the country’s image. 

Deciding whom to help

In other ways, however, the country is the victim of its own success, says Mitiku Kassa, who heads the National Disaster Risk Management Coordination Commission. Unlike other countries in the region facing disasters, “we can find the money and the resources,” he says, “but it means we spend our development budget on humanitarian issues.” Pouring that money into disaster relief, in other words, is akin to taking out a mortgage on the country’s future.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

One donkey who survived helped four families displaced by drought get to this spot by the side of a main road on the outskirts of Melkaselah village. Families migrate to roads so the government can see them and see that they need help.

In Ethiopia, indeed, both government and international NGOs have struggled to convince international donors to cut checks for assistance when drought crises in nearby countries like Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, and Nigeria are far more dire. The government has asked international donors for $948 million, but received only half of that, according to international NGO Save the Children. In May alone, 700,000 Ethiopians needing assistance went without food support for lack of funding.

“Overall, there’s a big stretch on resources in the humanitarian situation globally,” says Charlie Mason, humanitarian director for Save the Children in Ethiopia. (In March, indeed, the UN’s humanitarian chief, Stephen O’Brien, warned that the world was facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II).

And despite the obvious wisdom of early intervention and prevention projects like those carried out in Ethiopia, Mr. Mason says, “donors find it difficult to fund something that hasn’t happened yet.”

But Mr. Kassa and Mason both point out that Ethiopia’s track record in preventing famines should be a vote in favor of giving aid to the country – not against it.

“Sure, Ethiopia is much more self-sufficient [than its neighbors],” Mason says. “But the other side of that is that it’s easier to prevent a crisis here – which I think gives the world a moral obligation to do exactly that.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Farah Yusef feeds peanut butter paste, called Plumpy'Nut, to her daughter Halima, 16 months, at Save the Children's health and nutrition center for malnourished children at a hospital in Kebridhar, Somali Region, Ethiopia. Doctors say Halima is making a brisk recovery. Since the drought, the amount of malnourished children has doubled.

'Two polar opposite Ethiopias'

Donors may also have another ethical imperative to assist countries like Ethiopia and its neighbors, which, despite their minuscule contributions to global warming, have been among the hardest hit by the world’s changing climate. The southeast’s current drought comes on the heels of another in the north, which in turn came only three years after the 2011-12 drought in the Horn of Africa and ensuing famine in parts of neighboring Somalia. A generation or two ago, such a rapid succession of extreme weather events would have been unthinkable, locals say.

In the Somali region of Ethiopia, ground zero of the current drought, that series has been especially devastating. Most people here are herders, and families spend generations building flocks of cows, sheep, and camels. Losing them is a form of bankruptcy that could take another lifetime to recover from.  

“No rain, no water, no pasture, no milk, no food,” says a local herder named Halima Gawsole, ticking off the things she has lost since the rains first failed here a year ago. Now, she and thirty members of her extended family are on the move, their last possessions tethered to their final animal – a weary donkey. Another family member told them the government was delivering water and sacks of grain nearby, and they’ve come to see if it is true. “We’ve lost everything now,” she says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Halima Gawsole and thirty family members traveled to a roadside in search of help after another family member told them the government was delivering water and sacks of grain nearby. In six months, their 100 camels, 50 cattle, and 200 sheep and goats all died.

For the Ethiopian government, the story told by women like Ms. Gawsole sits uncomfortably beside the story they tell about themselves: one exemplified by Addis supermarkets stocked with French cheese, Coco Pops, and 30 kinds of pasta, a rags-to-riches story set to the soundtrack of whirring drills and thudding hammers.  

“There are two polar opposite Ethiopias happening side-by-side,” says a young doctor working in a pediatric malnutrition ward in the Somali region, who asked that her name not be used because “everything you say is political these days.”

The doctor, who comes from Addis and speaks the crisp, placeless English of the internationally educated, spends her days straddling both worlds: by day, treating the babies of women her own age who have never been to school or lived in a house with a tin roof; by night, Facetime-ing with her family in the doctors’ quarters.

But it’s clear there’s a little more of her Ethiopia to go around these days. A generation ago, many of the women she sees each day here might never have made it to a clinic at all.  Now, they spend their days in clean, warmly lit wards, coaxing their rail-thin babies to eat sachets of fortified peanut butter. Some of the families here are on the government’s welfare and public works program. Others have gotten assistance – food, water, a bit of cash – from the government or NGOs.

It isn’t prosperity, but it isn’t disaster, either. It’s somewhere in the expanse between – a room full of people just about getting by.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Muhannad, a migrant, works on his computer in March in Berlin.

Mohamad Taqi Sohrabi has had to fight for an education his entire life.

An Afghan refugee born in Iran, Mr. Sohrabi says it wasn’t easy for him to go to school. By age 10 or 11, he was working during the day and studying at night. Sohrabi was eventually able to study English translation at a university outside Tehran for four semesters, but as an Afghan in Iran, even that was difficult.

In 2015, he made the dangerous journey from Iran to Germany. Now he wants to enroll in a university and finish his education. But the authorities have not yet rendered a final decision on his asylum application, so he’s not certain if he will even be allowed to stay in Germany. And he’ll need to learn German before he can apply.

Sohrabi is one of the more than 1.2 million asylum seekers who have arrived in Germany in the last two years. Many of them are young people who want to pursue higher education. Like Sohrabi, they face many barriers, including mastering German, providing documents that prove previous academic records or qualifications, and dealing with the sometimes exhausting German bureaucracy.

But across Germany, initiatives have sprung up to help would-be students overcome the challenges, sometimes in innovative ways. Many universities have started programs to help refugees meet enrollment requirements. A startup called Kiron allows newcomers to take online courses in English before helping them transition to traditional universities. And Bard College Berlin is offering scholarships to refugees for a four-year liberal arts degree at the institution. Those formal programs are supplemented by citizens and activist networks working to connect prospective students with opportunities and raise money for scholarships.

Sohrabi is now progressing toward proficiency in German through intensive language courses at the Academic Welcome Program at Geothe University in Frankfurt. “It’s very helpful,” he says. “For both sides, it’s good – for Germany, and for the refugees.”

Ramping up refugees

Many of the efforts to boost access to higher education were born in 2015, as the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany suddenly swelled. Many universities quickly recognized that there would be a need to facilitate access for refugees, and began programs like the one at Goethe, which had 135 students in the spring term.

The Goethe program students take intensive German courses, can attend some university classes, and are given support in everything from CV writing to navigating the financial aid system. Most spend two to three semesters in the program reaching the level of language proficiency required to study in German universities. The program helps prepare students for whatever they choose to do after, whether that’s studying or applying for jobs or internships. But the goal, says project coordinator Marius Jakl, is that they end up as students at Goethe.

Such programs are common now across Germany. A similar one at the Free University in Berlin currently had 200 participants in the spring, and has already enrolled 20 former participants in the university. Both programs provide childcare in an effort to boost enrollment by women. Demand far outstrips supply – Jakl says last semester Goethe fielded about 250 applications for 45 spots, and Florian Kohstall, director of the program, says it perpetually has a waiting list of about 100 people.

Such programs aim to solve one of the biggest hurdles for potential students: learning German. But Bard College Berlin allows them to bypass that challenge altogether by offering them scholarships to study in English, the university’s language of instruction. Refugees need not master German before applying, though they will be required to learn it while studying there.

Students and staff at the small private liberal arts school in the capital watched as hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived in Europe in 2015 and realized the college was uniquely placed to help – both because of its location at the heart of the nation accepting the majority of asylum seekers, and because of its language of instruction. English is more commonly spoken by new arrivals, particularly those pursuing higher education, than German.

School officials raised private donations to fund a scholarship program for students from areas of crisis. The first five scholarships, awarded for study beginning last fall, went to four Syrian students and one Greek student. Thirteen more scholarships were awarded for study beginning this year, ten of them to Syrian students. [Editor's note: The original version misstated how many scholarships were awarded this year.]

The language hurdle

Florian Becker, Bard’s managing director, says the institution would like to further expand the program, though that is dependent on funding.

“Of course we’re entirely aware of the problem of scale here ... that [the Bard scholarships] can always be dismissed in a drop in the bucket,” he says. “But when you are a teacher such as we are, and you see what it does to those students, and what it means to their life situation, and to their perspective, then I get impatient with that charge. Because of course we’re small and we cannot change the world, but ... we have been trying to sort of punch above our weight and we’re still hoping to do that.”

One of the Bard scholarship recipients is Ahmad Mobayed, a Syrian who came to Bard by way of another initiative meant to reduce barriers to higher education for refugees: Kiron Open Higher Education. Kiron is a startup that allows refugees to enroll in online classes in English before helping them apply to traditional universities. Students gain credits from the online courses which they can later transfer to universities, allowing them to make progress toward their education in the time they spend learning German or waiting on bureaucracy. The organization declined an interview request, but according to the website, Kiron has at least 34 partner universities in Germany. [Editor's note: The original version misspelled Mr. Mobayed's first name.]

Mr. Mobayed arrived in Germany in 2015, eager to continue his education after exhausting his options elsewhere, and soon began courses with Kiron. “I think for my case, for the cases of many Syrians and people who arrived to Germany in the last three to four years, it was a solution or alternative for people who are motivated to study,” he says.

Last year Mobayed won one of the Bard College scholarships, and transferred 30 credits from his Kiron courses toward his degree at Bard.

Studying on a tightrope

Despite all these efforts, there are still challenges. Bureaucracy is one of them, says Dr. Kohstall of Free University.

At the beginning of the program, students would often miss days because they had to deal with appointments or paperwork related to their asylum status, he says. And while asylum holders are obliged to attend “integration courses,” which include language courses, to qualify for assistance, programs like the one at Free University aren’t recognized by the government as such.

Maryam Sayegh-Hussein, of the Goethe program, says many participants also struggle with stress and worry – about their housing, asylum status, and relatives in their home countries who are still in danger.

Such is the case for Sohrabi. While asylum applications from Syrians and other nationalities whose claims are often approved are processed relatively quickly, Afghans often wait months or years for answers, and are rejected in much higher numbers. Sohrabi waited a year just for his asylum interview, he says, and was recently informed that his application was rejected. He is now appealing that decision, which could take several years. He now lives in a camp for asylum seekers far from campus, where he shares a room with three others.

But the main problem is the uncertainty about his future. “For studying, it’s very difficult when all the time it’s in your mind that you’re waiting for something,” he says.

Courtesy of North Bennet Street School

A student tunes a piano. North Bennet Street School, in Boston's North End, runs full-time, accredited adult-education programs for a wide assortment of trades. Its carpentry program doubled in size in 2014, as young workers gravitate toward 'bespoke' trades, such as woodworking, bookbinding, and old-timey barbering.

Hunched over their workspaces in a dusty, sunlit room in the North Bennet Street School in Boston’s North End, Jim Reid-Cunningham’s bookbinding workshop seems grateful for an interruption.

The class is working through an unforgiving technique for repairing and restoring leather bindings, one in which tiny, irreversible errors can build off each other until the whole thing falls apart. “It’s like getting behind in the pitch count in baseball,” Mr. Reid-Cunningham says. His students nod in exasperated agreement.

North Bennet Street School runs accredited adult-education programs for a wide assortment of trades, from jewelry- and furniture-making to residential carpentry. In another part of the sprawling facility, located in an old police building, a student puts the finishing touches on his handmade violin. In the piano tuning and repair classrooms, a poster handwritten in markers lists “50 reasons for sluggish keys.” Reason 23: “Sticky from spilt soda.” Going through room after room of precision tools, workbenches, and hand-carved clocks, two things are noticeably absent: desks and computers.

Courtesy of North Bennet Street School

Bookbinding class. North Bennet Street School, in Boston's North End, runs full-time, accredited adult education programs for a wide assortment of trades, from jewelry and furniture making to locksmithing and residential carpentry.

Courtesy of North Bennet Street School

A student works in a jewelry making project. North Bennet Street School, in Boston's North End, runs full-time, accredited adult education programs for a wide assortment of trades, from jewelry and furniture making to locksmithing and residential carpentry.

“Our students don’t want to sit still for very long,” says provost Claire Fruitman, a graduate who built furniture professionally for a decade before coming back to teach and work in administration.

NBSS has been around for more than a century, but it caters to a corner of the labor market that has been gaining prominence more recently: young, middle-class workers drawn to decidedly old-fashioned occupations that allow them to work with their hands. Many – bookbinding, butchery, cutting hair in barbershops – used to be seen as menial trades. Among today’s practitioners however, they’re sought-after, artistic callings that offer a certain level of cultural cachet and, in some cases, more stability than a garden-variety office job.

For those who pursue it, such work is “an opportunity to use both their heads and their hands,” says Richard Ocejo, a sociologist and the author of the new “Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy.” “Learned people are dedicating themselves to these trades despite having other options.”

Such a path is hardly accessible for everyone. If anything, the rise of such careers is a product of more rigid class and career stratification. Nor does it mean that these jobs on the whole are becoming more elevated. A meat carver in a national supermarket chain likely can’t get a job at a whole-animal butcher shop in SoHo. Instead, it points to a new, narrow sliver of the service economy – one that works entirely in the service of high-end “knowledge workers” like doctors, lawyers, tech industry and finance workers – and carries a certain level of status in itself. 

“Getting one of these jobs is the result of a search for meaning in work, to get recognized for what they do, and for an occupation to anchor their lives and provide them with purpose,” Dr. Ocejo writes in “Masters of Craft.” “It is also the signal of their own privileged freedom to choose the career they wish.”

Quantifying the growth of these careers is difficult; job statistics don’t differentiate salon stylists from old-timey barbers, for example. One of the few concrete pieces of evidence is in the increase of new, independent alcohol distillers, which are licensed and regulated. Another: Thanks to applicant demand and a rebounding housing market, NBSS doubled the available slots in its carpentry program in 2014.

But the anecdotal evidence is everywhere – in the prominence of Etsy and craft forums, high-end flea markets, and furniture trade shows. Ocejo points to the rise of the “foodie” movement, which transformed what it could mean to be a chef. “That’s a bad job, with terrible hours; kitchens are terrible places to work, you get burns and cuts,” he says. “Unless you worked at an elite restaurant, no one cared about you. Now with open kitchens and so many different media [covering the food scene], it has become a very different job.”

A few things are driving the trend. One is urban gentrification and the increased concentration of the wealthy, educated upper class into cities. Having an individualized consumer experience, where they can talk to the creator about a custom chair or locally sourced appetizer, “appeals to their sensibilities,” Ocejo says. So the workers that cater to them have become more outwardly knowledgeable, more primed for interacting with that specific sort of client. There’s a performative aspect to it. “It’s [buying a table] and meeting the maker, having him convey what goes into that table and what makes it special and different than a table you would buy in the furniture store,” he says.

Courtesy of North Bennet Street School

A student works in a jewelry making project. North Bennet Street School, in Boston's North End, runs full-time, accredited adult education programs for a wide assortment of trades, from jewelry and furniture making to locksmithing and residential carpentry.

Another: For everyone who isn’t a wealthy, in-demand professional, the job market overall is less stable, and no longer neatly demarcated between blue-collar and white-collar work. So, young people reason, they might as well do what they like. Miranda Harter, a 2016 NBSS graduate, worked in retail inventory before enrolling in the school’s jewelry program. She’d be tasked with cataloguing accessories in an online database, mind-numbing work that put what she was missing in her career literally at her fingertips. “I was looking at these beautiful pieces of jewelry come across my desk, and I thought, I want to be making these things,” she remembers.

'It seems like an honest profession'

Ms. Harter now works full-time for a local jeweler in Somerville, and the owner allows her to use the space to make and sell her original pieces. It’s already proven more stable than her old job, which she lost during the Great Recession. “I’m working solid regular hours, I have a weekend, a boss who appreciates me,” she says. “That’s not something I experienced a lot in the retail world. To me, it seems like an honest profession, and more recession-proof. People are always getting married.”

Ms. Fruitman at NBSS says 30 is the average age of the student body, which means an “awful lot” of it is made up of career transitioners like Harter. “They've done college or some college, it wasn't for them, or maybe they've even been out there working and realized that whatever it is they're doing just isn't satisfying.”  

Fruitman is also describing herself. Before becoming a furniture maker, she majored in theater at Emerson College and worked as a photo stylist until the work dried up. 

“I was at the point where I really wanted to do something that was tangible,” she says. "I didn't know you could do this. I went to college because that's what everybody does. And that's what I was expected to do.”

Ocejo heard similar stories while profiling barbers, butchers, and high-end cocktail bartenders in Manhattan.

“I grew up similarly to them, and I knew a bunch of people who were bartending to do something else, but these people were calling it their career,” he says. “In 2007, that wasn’t normalized yet.” In “Masters of Craft,” he writes that his subjects “often describe having to justify what they do to their families, who imagined a nice, clean, stable office job for their kids.”

But he says that dynamic has changed, even in the handful of years since he gathered those interviews. “Today if a kid goes out of a four-year college and wants to be a chef or butcher, I don’t think their parents would be as bewildered by it.”

What’s more, Fruitman notes, the career trajectories for some of these professions aren’t as narrow as they can seem at first glance. Bookbinding is hardly a growth industry, for instance, but someone trained in it “can have a bindery, or a repair shop, can work at a museum, a library, a university.” A whole-animal butcher can move on to run the meat program for a hospitality group or restaurateur.

“There are so many opportunities out there,” she says.

Not a path to the middle class

Those opportunities aren’t available to everyone, though. Just because the middle class is increasingly occupying these jobs, that doesn’t mean they are paths to the middle class. NBSS is mindful of its students’ career prospects, but completing the jewelry program, for example, costs close to $50,000.

The circles that Ocejo explores in his research, too, are overwhelmingly white, young, college-educated, and male. “There are cultural reference points and frankly networks that are important to getting these jobs that people who didn’t go to college don’t have,” he says. “Moving to city and working in an industry after college, you know where the ‘cool’ spots are. Where can I get cool food, cool clothing? You know that in a way that someone from a low-income Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn does not.”

Fitting the mold can be the difference between working a low-level job or its bespoke equivalent: 60 percent of all bartenders are women, for example, but the majority of cocktail bartenders, who come up with their own recipes and participate in showcases and competitions, are men.

Those other jobs aren’t going anywhere. “The meat counter at the supermarket isn’t closing,” Ocejo points out. It serves a different client base and means that the consumer-maker relationship is being further codified along class lines. “There’s a re-entrenchment of class divisions there,” he says.

Because they occupy a still-small, fuzzily-defined sliver of the economy, what’s next for these types of careers is an open question. Some jobs hinge largely on being seen as a tastemaker and fitting a certain image, which means they have a built-in shelf life. Most of the people profiled in “Masters of Craft” are under 35. But if the preference for small-batch, “authentic” products persists, Ocejo says, those workers could open their own shops, or move into corporate roles to help large, established companies keep pace.

He sees signs that the demand for these products is increasingly mainstream. “We’re seeing these businesses crop up outside New York, San Francisco, these major cities,” he says. “I live in the Hudson Valley. Here, we have a couple of farm-to-table restaurants, one butcher shop, one cocktail bar, neighborhood places have local craft beers. We wouldn’t have had that a decade ago.”

For some, figuring out how to grow their businesses without sacrificing that small-batch credibility is the main focus. Tod Van Mertens, a furniture maker in New Hampshire, recently moved his operation from a barn in his backyard to a 7,500-square-foot industrial space. “It’s really changed the quality of my work and made it more efficient,” he says. “I’ve always been this backyard, handmade craftsman and now I’m on the bridge of real manufacturing. So many designers make something and sub it out to a factory, but I still have my hands in as many aspects as possible.” 

He spends a lot of his time at the moment on the administrative side of running his business, but wants to get back to creating new things in his workshop. “Right now I’m doing all of the office work, sales, and client interactions. But I’d like to bring on a couple more people to do it for me.”

Brandon Wade/AP

Reality TV couple and new parents Sean and Catherine Lowe revealed son Samuel's chic nursery at their new home in Dallas in 2016. The couple made a deal with a laundry detergent company to share memories from their first year of parenthood on the brand's social channels. In the age of Instagram, parents have mixed opinions about how much of their children's information to share online.

Two million likes in the first hour. Even for Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, that is an impressive rate. 

One week ago, Ms. Knowles-Carter announced the birth of her twins with husband Jay-Z on Instagram, and the photo has since amassed more than 9.8 million likes. Knowles-Carter, arguably the most famous pop star in the world, frequently posts photos of her family on social media. Her Instagram post announcing her pregnancy on Feb. 1 is currently the most-liked photo on Instagram with 11.1 million likes. 

But a friend of Beyoncé’s and fellow star, Blake Lively, has taken a different approach to fame and motherhood. Ms. Lively’s two daughters with husband Ryan Reynolds are absent from the actress’ Instagram account and the private couple made their first and only public appearance as a family in December. 

Beyoncé and Lively are public figures, but their differing stances on motherhood and social media reflect a debate that goes beyond Hollywood.    

“[T]hey represent two very different ways of parenting in the digital age when it comes to Instagram and an image-based social network,” says Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and author of the book, "The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age." 

Increasingly, young mothers across the United States have strong opinions on “sharenting.” Those who favor using Instagram say the platform is a great way to share everything from first steps to zoo visits with distant family and creates a living photo album for their child to look back on. Those who oppose online sharing say it invades their child’s privacy with unknown future implications. 

Mothers on both sides of the debate, though, cite relationship-building as one main reason behind their “sharenting” stance. Some find camaraderie through new virtual friendships, while others choose to deepen existing relationships through face-to-face sharing.

“At their best, the motives are similar. It’s to connect, to share, to be known, to be seen, to have a sense that you are not alone,” says Dr. Steiner-Adair. “But the medium that you use to nourish those appetites for connection can vary widely.”

The Beyoncés

Samantha Eason, a mom in her mid-20s from St. Louis, says she went through a hard time after the birth of her son Isaac. 

“My husband lost his job, all my friends were on the East Coast, and I felt really isolated,” says Ms. Eason. But building an online community with her 12,700 Instagram followers – some of them also young moms – helped.

According to a 2015 poll by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, 72 percent of parents say social media helps them feel not alone. And a Pew Research report from July 2015 found this sentiment was much stronger among mothers: 80 percent of mothers say they receive parenting support from social media, compared to 65 percent of fathers. 

Dani Nemeh is one of the friends Eason has made on Instagram. Ms. Nemeh, a young mom from Orlando, Fla., similarly credits her 66,000 followers with helping her through parenting struggles such as morning sickness or the sleeping patterns of her 2-year-old son Charlie. 

“They will offer me advice from the most loving place,” says Nemeh. “It’s nice you can be there for someone who is going through something, even if we have not met.”

The Blakes

Many parents, however, have concerns about online sharing. The poll from C.S. Mott Children's Hospital also found that 68 percent of parents worry their posts share private information about their child. 

“The teacher in me always thinks, you need to be the biggest advocate for your child,” says Julia, a mom from Boston who preferred to only use her first name. She does not share photos of her two daughters on Facebook or Instagram. “It all comes down to privacy and my children’s innocence… Why post them for the whole world?”

Anti-sharing moms say it can feel uncomfortable asking family or friends to avoid posting photos, and they often feel left out in their mommy-groups. But they also say being “sharenting-free” has actually helped strengthen relationships by requiring in-person sharing.

“Instagram is a great way to connect and get in touch with people,” says a young mom from Florida, also named Julia. “But I hope we stay in touch so we can get together in person, either have dinner or a playdate in real life… Hopefully we can share those moments together, face-to-face.” 

The American Academy of Pediatrics published a study in October recommending that pediatricians educate parents on the dangers of oversharing. The first “children of social media” are now entering adulthood, says lawyer Stacey Steinberg in the study’s abstract, so the future implications of parents’ digital footprints’ are still unknown.  

But a happy medium is definitely possible, says Sarah Clark, co-director of C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. “And the first step towards that is being cognizant. It requires parents making really specific choices for their kids, and knowing that these choices may be different than the ones they would make for themselves.”

Eason, the mom from St. Louis, says she has learned to be more wary of social media posts. Instead of including specific geo-tags in posts featuring Isaac, for example, now she will now just add a generic citywide tag, or none at all.

“It is not all butterflies and rainbows on here,” says Eason. “I have to be careful.”

AP Photo

Basherow Hassen, a mother of four, waits for food aid with her twin children in the Warder district in the Somali region of Ethiopia, Jan. 28 2017.

With more than 20 million people at risk of famine, or what is called the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II, a Monitor series this week looks at some of the successes in avoiding famine. The focus is on the peasant farmers of Eastern Africa, the epicenter of a drought-fueled hunger crisis. More deeply, the articles probe what it means to build “resilience” among people in dealing with a disaster.

Resilience implies a sustainable capacity of strength and intelligence to face a hazard and to recover. One country in the region, Ethiopia, has shown remarkable progress in resilience ever since the 1980s when a famine killed hundreds of thousands. Last year, for example, its government was able to provide close to half of the relief money for the country’s drought.

One reason for Ethiopia’s progress is that many small-scale farmers have developed the skills and assets to endure dry periods. Instead of passively accepting a scarcity of rain, they have created an abundance of new irrigation, improved farming techniques, upgraded roads and schools, and instituted better land rights for women. To achieve these, however, villages also needed to develop a shared vision to devise local solutions and not rely on cookie-cutter ideas imposed from outside.

Other countries have also relied on community-driven goals to lift up the poor. In the 1970s, South Korea set up its New Village program, or Saemaul Undong. After a genocidal rampage in the mid-1990s, Rwanda decentralized many of its economic programs. More recently, Brazil’s Zero Hunger program (Fome Zero) relied on local action groups.

The idea of community-led development has now blossomed worldwide. The change can be seen in the sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Not only has the UN set a goal to end persistent hunger by 2030, it also calls for participatory decisionmaking “at all levels.” That is a big shift from the UN’s 2000-15 millennium development goals, which relied on a top-down approach driven by national governments and the international aid community.

Many aid groups are calling to “localize the SDGs.” The World Bank insists that the poor “effectively organize to identify community priorities.” The United States Agency for International Development has set up self-reliance programs in Africa that use a bottom-up approach; villages drive the agenda and must hold local officials accountable.

The conceptual shift lies in seeing the poor less as victims or beneficiaries and more as leaders with all the qualities, such as integrity, to deal with a disaster. They may need immediate food aid or tips on how a community can define a new future. But the talents and resources to end their own hunger lie largely within.

The poor’s dignity is not so much restored as it is expressed.

If given the capacity to set their own goals, the hungry should be seen as partners in solving their problems, not clients or dependents. They may need a fish to eat right away and later be taught how to fish. But most of all, they must be seen as able to discover their own fishing poles.

In that idea lies resilience.