I'm a TED addict. Diving into TED.com eats untold hours of my life. For a busy, curious human, what's not to like about TED? The talks are 18 minutes max, all of them given by amazing meritocrats. Their subjects range from the incredible data-bubble system of Hans Rosling to...

The people looking at you in this photo are Job Bebenimibo and his students in the Giraffe Service Club International in Oporoza, Nigeria.

Take a good look. They may all be dead. On May 16 the village of Oporoza was attacked by the...

It helps to have lived in Vietnam and the Congo. I mean, I've seen poor, really poor. People sleeping in shifts on the dirt floors of scrap-metal shacks. Rice or manioc as the only food at a meal, and everyone thankful to have even that. Students using every square inch,...

When we're kids, Presidents are our fathers' ages. When we make it to adulthood, Presidents fall into the elder-brother bracket. And then there's the shock of a contemporary taking the office. If the President is your own age, Your Generation has taken charge.

Me, I'm looking for the first time...

If McCain doesn't stop being a poster boy for senile dementia, I may start dissing seniors myself. And I am one. Sheesh!

Meanwhile, here's one fully cognizant elder with a few things to say about this election:

Point -- I do not want to have a beer with the President...

Setting: a house in the forest on a Puget Sound island, two people sitting on a porch at dusk, lovely dinner before us, good talk, perfect weather. And some flying thing lands fast on my arm and whips back into the forest. "That was weird." And we proceed with the...

The Giraffe Heroes Project sent a team to the five-day Seeds of Compassion conference in Seattle. As a Giraffe staffer, I talked with hundreds of teachers and parents who had assembled there, telling them about Giraffe ways to foster compassion in the young.

After days of giving,...

I don't know about you but I'm already saturated with campaign news. Given the 24/7 coverage by thousands of voices and keyboards, from here to November is looking like an eternity.

One problem is the teeth-grinding effect of watching and reading too much "news." Because of the writing. I'm...

The remote Puget Sound island where I live joined the great Aught Eight election excitement Saturday, the Democratic caucus bringing out so many citizens that cars lined the roads around the high school for a mile.

I can report out that the Maxwelton Valley sector of South Whidbey Island...

Old feminist here, contemporary of Steinem's,* and one who wishes all young women grokked how different life was for us back in the day, how much they owe the women's movement, how precarious the changes are that make their current opportunities seem givens--and permanent.

*Full disclosure: Steinem wrote a...

Friend of mine, a fellow writer I'll call "Joe," put the question to his email network last week: Would anyone join him in a hunger strike for the closing of Guantanamo? It would be a real one that wouldn't stop until/unless the prisoners were turned over to the US...

It isn't what the Chief had in mind, I'm sure, but over the years he's acquired a couple of ghost writers -- one poet/physician and one screenwriter.

The gorgeous environmental speech that is everywhere attributed to the nineteenth-century tribal leader was, in fact, written by screenwriter Ted...

"Somebody wrote that."

Three words, five syllables, a theme of the Writers' Guild of America. They're the perfect words for sending this writer's fist straight into the air with a fervent Yes!

I just heard someone say, after a report on the Guild's strike, "I'm against strikes." Well,...

We've got class issues rumbling in this country. Or we should. Doors are slamming on the tradition that class doesn't lock the children of the poor in their parents' world, that with big dreams and hard work, capable American kids can move up.

The main way up...

It's interesting to be in the work of fostering citizen courage in this time when a growing national theme seems to be: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

"Interesting" is, of course, sarcasm. What I'm really feeling is anger.

Are you listening to our "leaders"? To people seeking higher office? To...