I went to Stuyvesant High School in New York City, just three blocks from the World Trade Center. On 9/11 I ran from the burning towers and on October 9th, 2001, I returned to a school building contaminated with dust and debris. It would not be fully cleaned until the...

In America, most of our myriad religious traditions value the concept of "compassion": the idea that helping those in need is worthwhile just because being a good person is worthwhile. When we bring food to the bereaved, help a blind person cross the street, or pick up the mail for...

Millennials (the unfortunate moniker linked to the generation now in their late teens and 20s) get a lot of flack for needing so much positive reinforcement. We apparently have too much self-esteem, too little motivation, and outrageously high expectations that make us ill-suited to corporate environments...

Things were still very up in the air when my high school met for the first time after 9/11. Our building, only three blocks from Ground Zero, was being used as a command center for the rescue effort and we had been relocated to Brooklyn. The administration was careful not...

Last month I got a call from a neighbor in Los Angeles who had seen me out walking eight blocks from our building. He was, very considerately, calling to make sure I was okay. He assumed my car had broken down.

This is regular part of life in LA,...

I was raised in the church of politics. My pastors were Jerry Brown when I was nine, Maxine Waters when I was thirteen and at sixteen I joined the church of Jerry Nadler. Like every teenager, I spent some time dabbling in other churches as well. Socialism. Marxism. Anarchism. My...

I have a confession to make. Lindsey Graham, close your ears. I don't have time to deal with being deported right now. I just need to get this off my chest:

My grandmother was an anchor baby.

Wait, before this goes any further, let me clarify. She was an...

There is a lot of angry chatter in the streets of my neighborhood these days. Community members recently learned that the Bowery Residents Committee (BRC), which operates a number of programs for the homeless in NYC, intends to combine several of their facilities into a vertical "campus"...

America has a new group among the marginalized. I'm not talking about people of any particular race, creed, sexual orientation, or gender. I'm speaking of the victims of corporate intolerance, the primacy of profit, and the corrupt politics of health care; Americans with pre-existing conditions. From victims heart disease to...

During the terrible aftermath of the 7.0 quake that hit Haiti last month, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann had Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York on as a guest. Obermann's show, Countdown, had booked Rep. Weiner's appearance in order to discuss health care, but the news from Haiti was too horrifying to...

I've always considered myself a member of the housing boom generation -- the generation of people who knew how to flip a house before we had even graduated from high school. Recently, the housing bust has robbed that designation of meaning, but with the slowing pace of the economy, we've...