Spit out that Thanksgiving leftover ham and pick up a barf bag. Because even the hardy Pilgrims would take a pass on some of those leftovers if they knew just how gross our contemporary system of raising animals for food truly is...

1. It's like 80's porn, but for female...

Educating one girl changes, well, everything. Here's why:

- When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children.

- An extra year of primary school boosts girls' eventual wages by 10 to 20...

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

I asked her for directions (read: flirted) to Clifton Beach five days after unpacking my luggage: a muddied, yellow backpack.

Two months later, she's my girlfriend, and I'm the boy at her family's annual "braai," the word for barbecue in...

To my fellow men:

It's time to bring forward some reasoned arguments against the wave of "evidence" and public opinion claiming that meat is unhealthy, unethical, and unattractive. The next time you're being bullied by the carrot mobs, give them a spoonful of sloppy joe and the...

Last week, the animal protection organization Mercy For Animals released a video taken undercover by an employee wearing a hidden camera at a dog factory farm in Kamrar, Iowa. The worker was employed between April and June of this year.

The employee documented horrific abuses such as...

"Why the light bulb?" a young entrepreneur once asked Thomas Edison. "I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent."

And our 2011 world has a lot of needs. One of them, though, is particularly ripe for a new brand of capitalism.

See, we wouldn't tolerate...

Hundreds of dogs were crammed on a truck heading north along a major highway in Beijing on April 16th of this year.

The dogs were headed for restaurants in Changchun, a city in northeastern China. Have you been? If yes, you'll know that in Changchun restaurants you can...

Where are you?

Three rows of masks hang on the wall. Barbed-wire encircles the building. Enormous sets of fans bang. Machines power on intermittently, then without warning, shut-off. And the wire floor you're standing on is bizarrely slanted.

How long have you been here? A day? Years?

You're confined. And...

During this time of pessimism, some see our biggest needs as opportunities to thrive. A few stories show how selflessness is often (ironically) profitable.

Story 1: I'm running through a coffee plantation in Dembidollo, Ethiopia. I'm flagged down by a group of kids playing soccer with a ball made out...

You're working in a company or organization trying to do some good.

Maybe you're Katie Meyler of More than Me, an organization driven to get little girls off the street and into school in Liberia. Or perhaps you're the founders of LiveProud, a company (yes,...

I love the taste of animals.

I've eaten lots of every kind. Almost definitely more than you. Why? Maybe it's because I was raised in Birmingham, Ala. where Taco Bell was just sued for not stuffing enough beef into their tacos. It's a Southern thing.

Or...

Location: Liberia, West Africa.

Meet Francis, my former running buddy and security guard in Liberia. He's also one of the two billion people living in the vice grip of energy poverty -- without light, without heat, without a single electron of power. He was 7-years-old when he was ripped...

"An idea without execution is just a hallucination." -- Colin Powell

Was General Powell a bit harsh? Maybe. But, for all you do-gooders brimming with solutions to the world's biggest problems, it's a good kind of harsh.

And in the world of impact, in particular, a big part of executing...

Well, at least not completely. Here's the deal: The intersection of the social web and social good is flipping the traditional funding process upside down. And it's going to revolutionize how we create and scale impact.

The phenomenon, called crowdfunding, also powers something as -- or even more...

We are drowning. And not just in credit card bills and tuition payments. We are drowning in false choices.

We are told that we must choose between making money and making a difference -- that it is not possible to harness our strengths, embrace our passions and have a career...

Crowdfunding -- the collective cooperation by people who network and pool their money together -- is here. And the implications, from technology to community-powered renewable energy to political campaigns or to financing the next wave of social enterprises, are immense.

The Obama campaign, through harnessing small contributions from millions of...

The recession is a bad deal for everyone. Debt explodes. Dreams are deferred. Job loss drains the bank account. Futures are questioned.

It seems young people, though, are uniquely unprepared for the world in which they now find themselves.

They are coming of age in a world where...