As the Occupy Wall Street enters its fourth week, the meta-narrative around the rapidly spreading movement is beginning to take shape. From CNN to Fox News to many protestors themselves, one central slogan is sticking: corporate greed.

During...

We join millions grieving for Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai. She altered the course of our lives, and our one solace is in knowing that she has changed -- and will continue to change -- the lives of millions of others. She taught us about the work of hope.

In...

From "Diet for a Small Planet" exactly 40 years ago, it dawned on me that humans are actively creating the scarcity we say we are trying to escape. Whoa! Why would our bright species do such a thing? Researching my new book, "EcoMind, Changing the Way We Think to Create...

This week an open letter to McDonald's signed by 550 health professionals appears in full-page ads in newspapers across the country. Their message? Real simple: "Stop making the next generation sick--retire Ronald and the rest of your junk food marketing to kids," said signer Dr. Steven K. Rothschild,...

Tuesday's big partisan swing has pundits and public alike asking: So, what's the lesson?

With a sea of money sloshing through the campaigns, but not necessarily bringing the biggest spenders into office, some might be tempted to suggest money doesn't matter after all.

Big mistake.

And it's one Stephen...

Joblessness and low-wage jobs grab headlines and hearts, but right now we have a chance to back folks who were losing ground way before the Great Recession.

Meet the workers of Immokalee, Florida, who pick our tomatoes but make just 50 cents for filling each 32-pound bucket. In real terms,...

If you've followed the controversy over the January Supreme Court decision giving corporations the right to unlimited election spending, you've probably gotten an earful about "corporate personhood." It's a legal doctrine giving corporations certain rights of real people (adding to their privileges, such as "limited liability," beyond those...

We'll be living for decades, or longer, with the consequences of the BP disaster. That much seems clear. So the question now is, how -- how will we proceed after Deepwater Horizon? What lessons will we take in and use?

Randy Kennedy, in the New York Times'...

Mother's Day is a great time for lightening the burden on moms. I mean, we've been cast as way too responsible for how our species has turned out.

"[O]ur line of apes is in a class by itself," argues anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others:...

We're almost home when a big hand-drawn plywood sign on the side of the street catches our eye -- "Hooray Arizona." My partner Richard Rowe is puzzled, murmuring that he didn't know an Arizona team had played today.

"It's immigration the guy is angry about," I say. And we both...

I'm relieved that our country's taken a first step in getting a grip on health insurance for all, but we're sunk unless we can now get a grip on our health. With diet implicated in much of our nation's disease burden, it makes a lot of sense to reverse the...

The vote is in. Health insurance rules and options will now offer Americans some greater protection. But in recent weeks opponents' charges have gotten so wild -- "Idolatrous Statism!" "Totalitarianism!" -- and hate-filled acts so egregious -- the spitting of racial slurs at black Congressmen -- many wonder how a...

A lot of Americans are really angry, as so many of our dreams seem to be fading away.

Anger can be useful, it's true, but only if we can grasp what's at the root of our pain, if we can understand how we got here -- to a society producing...

Libertarians must be ecstatic, even if a bit envious that the Tea Party's getting all the credit. Anti-tax groups are protesting loudly and calls for "limited" government, and even for cutting the federal government by half -- ala Glenn Beck -- are stirring the passions of frustrated Americans.

The...

Tea Partiers, make room. The Coffee Party is about to steal some of your media thunder. Around for only a few weeks, it officially launches March 13th, having already attracted 109,000 Facebook fans, slightly more than the Tea Party, around about a year. The Coffee...

If you can remember Nixon, you probably know the name Daniel Ellsberg.

Either way you've almost certainly heard of the Pentagon Papers -- the explosive documents detailing government deception of the public during the Vietnam War, which Ellsberg leaked to the New York Times and other papers in 1971.

The normally closed Supreme Court opened a crack last week, as Clarence Thomas defended the 5-4 decision clearing away limits on corporate spending to influence elections.

"If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group," he said, "you'd say you have First Amendment rights...

Early in his Peace Prize speech Barack Obama told the world that "war, in one form or another, appeared with the first man."

The president was wrong. And his mistake has huge consequences.

Anthropologists conclude that during roughly 90 percent of Homo sapiens' evolution, for nearly 200,000 years, we...

As we come together to offer Thanksgiving for all of the plenty we share here today, our hearts seek the courage to end the growing hunger that...

The Republican national committee seems to think they're socialist. Dick Cheney dubbed them part of, you know, the "Old Europe," suggesting they're locked in a useless past. In any case, they've nothing to teach us, right?

Not so fast.

In a world searching for answers to multiple assaults,...