In 1998, John Wood was a dedicated Microsoft executive who needed a vacation. That year, while trekking through Nepal, he encountered a village so bankrupt of reading material that he vowed to come back the following year with as many books as he could carry. Soon thereafter, he founded the...

Words By Emily Pilloton
Photos By Jen Dessinger

In early 2007, on a plane returning to San Francisco from her third harried business trip of the month, the veteran designer Valerie Casey sensed the first unmistakable feelings of revolt. As an important player in the design world, Casey, 35,...

Words By William Bostwick

Renzo Piano's New York Times building in midtown Manhattan is a glass-skinned tribute to one of the oldest and most prestigious newspapers in the world. It's also a thousand-foot-tall middle finger to the environmentally-friendly-design establishment. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design--you probably know it as LEED--sets...

Words By Corey Binns
Photos By Jen Dessinger

Outside a convenience store, a teenage girl makes an offer to an intimidating group of men: "You can do anything you want to me for 50 bucks." When one of them asks about her younger sister, standing nearby, she offers her...

Iraq
"Fierce fighting in Baghdad's Sadr City fuelled the bloodshed in April, with at least 1,073 people killed across Iraq and the U.S. military's toll hitting a seven-month high."
-- AFP, May 1, 2008

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in the half light...

Words By Mark Peters
Illustrations By Kim Scafuro

If you saw Blades of Glory last year, you may have chuckled when Will Ferrell used the word "mind-bottling," which he defined as "when your thoughts get so twisted up it's like they're trapped in a bottle." Or maybe you have...

Words By Chalmers Johnson

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the mid-1950s, my teachers included many brilliant refugees from Hitler's Germany. Sometimes, when we got to know them personally, we would ask them when they had bailed out. In some cases it was quite late. My professor...

Words By Chris Ladd
Illustrations By Kim Scafuro

There are a lot of people getting screwed out there in this great nation of ours. Ten years ago, I would never have known how many. But now I know, for instance, that it took one guy nearly three months to...

Words By Rebecca Cathcart

When Drew Endy envisions the future, he sees giant gourds engineered to grow into four-bedroom, two-bathroom houses. He sees people alerted to nascent tumors in their bodies by internal biological sensors, and cars fueled by bacteria-produced gasoline. Endy, 37, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a...

Words By GOOD magazine

What does a $20 donation do for Kiva?
Any donation helps us cover our basic operational costs--paying salaries, keeping the lights on, etc. In 2007, for every $1 Kiva receives in donations, we raised another $10 online in loans for the poor.

How...

Words By Corey Binns

For Jehane Noujaim, there are few things more emotionally stirring than a movie. So when the 34-year-old filmmaker was offered the chance to change the world by having one wish become a reality, she didn't ask for money to build water wells or ship medical supplies....

Words By Adam M Bright

It takes a rare kind of courage to live like a character in a story, and not many real-life human beings have the nerve to try it--perhaps because the elements that make a narrative compelling also make life miserable. Most people are too attached...

Words By Maywa Montenegro

When California voters went to the polls in November, 2006, they had the chance to pass a historic measure, taxing the oil industry to pay for research on clean energy. Hollywood spent $40 million on a "yes" campaign, and it had big-name endorsements from Bill Clinton,...

What does a $20 donation do for Slow Food?
A $20 donation helps us identify one more person who gives a damn about good food. In a lot of ways Slow Food is based on the idea that membership organizations (whether by becoming a member or in any way...

School Lunch

1. CHICKEN and BROCCOLI

Pasadena High School
The healthiest school lunch we could find: chicken with broccoli, carrots, and white rice, with three pieces of fruit for dessert and a carton of 2-percent milk to wash it all down.

The Department...

Words By Taylor Clark
Photos By Greg Miller

When Seth Tibbott stopped eating meat, back in 1974, Thanksgiving became one of the bleakest dates on his calendar--an entire day devoted to a sumptuous roasted bird that he couldn't touch. "It was like, 'Here's your salad and baked potato--be happy,'"...

Words By Daniel Brook
Photos By Greg Miller

Sara Horowitz's grandmother lived in the Amalgamated Dwellings, a development on Manhattan's Lower East Side built in 1930 by a garment-workers union--the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. To Horowitz, the founder of the Freelancer's Union, the buildings symbolize an inspiring era...

Words By Matt Schwartz
Photos By Greg Miller

Let the voter beware. Primary season is here, bringing with it the exaggerations, half-baked statistics, and bald-faced whoppers that tend to flow from the mouths of presidential hopefuls. The live debates, especially, are epistemological free-for-alls. Claims, assertions, and figures babble forth...

Words By Adam M. Bright
Photos By Greg Miller

In the summer of 2006, city buses in Denver were plastered with images of a dead, desiccated horse hanging upside down from a tree in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. The horse had been deposited there by the 25-foot floodwaters accompanying Hurricane...

Words By Christopher Ketcham
Photos By Sarah Schorr

Increasingly, I have no fealty to the U.S. government. This has nothing to do with George Bush, bogeyman of the Left, the war in Iraq, or Halliburton, and everything to do with the reasonable assessment that the United States is too...