We can end war.

Please, before you read on, let those four words float in silence for half a minute, until you actually hear them -- until they come alive with meaning as insistent as a hatching egg. War is not inevitable, no matter how cluelessly enthusiastic the media may...

"Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow." -- chorus of an 1828 minstrel song

"We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it." -- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Yeah, it's called mass incarceration....

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

I think Archimedes was serious. I know we need to be. Now is the time to choose our future, as the Earth Charter declares. This means thinking big: embracing...

Maybe the problem is that rape is an extension of military culture. And it's metastasizing, even as legislation to address it stays trapped in congressional subcommittee.

Scandals and outrage come and go, but rape is ever-present. In 2011, a Pentagon report estimated that 19,000 sexual assaults had occurred in the...

Let's all work together to stop terrorism!

The Palm Beach County, Fla. Sheriff's Office has a new video out urging local citizens to call them if something smells bad or seems a little weird, like, oh, a tourist is taking a picture of a bridge but there's...

You're strapped to a metal table, unable to move. They stick a two-foot plastic tube up your nose, then down the back of your throat into your stomach. They squirt in the liquid protein. You gag, bleed, vomit. It's unbearably painful.

The practice of involuntary force-feeding is condemned by...

"Everywhere near the building, the stench of death was overpowering. Men in surgical masks sprayed disinfectant in the air."

We move from tragedy to tragedy with hellish regularity.

"The scope of injuries," Jim Yardley writes in the New York Times, "was horrifying: fractured skulls, crushed rib cages, severed...

In the new security state, not even garbage will have privacy.

"Terrorism," the Chicago Sun-Times informed us last week, "has created a new market in Chicago and other big cities for a company that started out making bear resistant garbage containers about 14 years ago."

Clear plastic trash...

"She had a great sense of humor and freckles and red hair that brought her right to her Irish roots."

She was "a dream daughter."

I have a daughter, so maybe that's why these words cut so deep.

This was a dad's description of a young woman, Krystle...

In the not so distant future, America's skies will be full of . . . drones.

What could go wrong?

"Although the prospect of drones flying over U.S. cities is generating cries of spies in the skies," writes the Los Angeles Times, "groups from California to Florida are...

Are the bad ideas dead yet? You know, the ones that have been hollowing out the country's soul for the last 30 years.

In Atlanta, they just indicted 35 teachers, principals and administrators, including a former superintendent, for routinely altering their students' standardized test results -- and...

"The status quo in Chicago is no longer tolerable," Andy Willis said, summoning the violent headlines of the past year and the past week.

This was Palm Sunday, in a church basement in a big-city neighborhood, and the time had come to stand for something enormous. My God, a...

We've lost a war without being able to surrender -- and thus divest ourselves of the consciousness that got us into it. We are unable to look honestly at what we did and why, and determine not to do it again.

My friend Catherine Menninger sent me a note the...

"Indeed," writes David Korten, "we have become so entranced in the illusion that money is a measure of real wealth and a storehouse of value that we have allowed it to displace life as our object of sacred veneration and become the ultimate arbiter of human priorities."

As...

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Philip Zimbardo's TEDTalk on Abu Ghraib and "The Psychology of Evil" is up to 2,374,000 hits. Apparently people are hungry to know about the deep psychology...

Sometimes what I fear most is that the disintegration of public life -- indeed, the very idea of the public good -- is complete. The vultures and profiteers swarm around the carcass and make a profit and that's all that matters.

Thirty years on, the Reagan Revolution has done...

"War's lingering phantoms haunt every society."

As two hellish, costly and needless wars struggle toward collapse, this is the time -- now, right this minute, before the next false alarm goes off -- for us to look honestly at the cost and quality of national security based on militarism. It's...

You're young and prone to trouble. You get triggered quickly. Someone tells you that you've screwed up and you're about to lash back. Then, instead, you think:

1. Look at the other person.

2. Say "OK."

3. Stay calm.

This is what you do. And nothing happens, except that the...

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Beyond the science and the fun -- fetuses masturbating! -- Mary Roach's TEDTalk is about ... well, our giggling, collective discomfort with the human body and...

A child is murdered and we thrash about once more in the spectacle of tragedy.

"With outrage over Hadiya Pendleton's slaying spreading from City Hall to the White House," the Chicago Tribune reported last week, "the 15-year-old became a symbol Wednesday of escalating violence in Chicago while...