"Should old acquaintance be forgot a-a-nd never brought to mi-i-i-i-nd ..." Ka-pow! Honnnkk! Pop! Smooch, smooch.

I love the noise, love kissing my friends, hoisting the bubbly and draining the cup of kindness. I've always been thrilled by the year's turning and still imagine -- just as I did as...

"This amendment starts from the premise that health care is a human right, and that every citizen, rich or poor, should have access to health care, just as every citizen has access to the fire department, the police or public schools."

And for a moment last week the fog of...

"Go home and write anything that comes to your mind. Don't stop. Write for ten minutes or till you've filled a whole page."

Ken Macrorie said this just in time, as far as I'm concerned.

The date was May 5, 1964. I was still in high school, a month...

I hope the Dignity in Schools Campaign overflows its banks, spilling awareness into every corner of the country.

"Millions of children and youth are denied educational opportunities in the United States," begins the National Resolution for Ending School Pushout, which some 200 organizations in 43 states have so far...

Dear Barack . . . Mr. President . . . brilliant, courageous (I once thought) guy I voted for:

You're great. I mean the way you put words together. As I listened to you on Tuesday night, I thought about the interlocking, dovetail-joint perfection of your language: the crisp-edged certainty...

In the cradle of civilization, young women have become terrified about having children.

This is the news I take with me into Thanksgiving and the season of gratitude and family togetherness: that doctors in Fallujah, the Iraqi city we devastated in two military assaults in 2004, have begun documenting...

There's no armor, it turns out, for conscience.

So our men and women are coming home from the killing fields wounded in their heads, used up, greeted only by the military's own meat grinder of inadequate health care and intolerance for "weakness."

"Frankly, in my more than 25 years...

Moving forward from the latest massacre, three narratives -- well, one of them is no more than the familiar, all-purpose shrug of experts, puzzled over yet another "isolated incident" -- are vying to explain what happened and set the direction of our future.

Is Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged...

It all felt wild and uncontained, like on the playground. I was the outsider kid, wrong jacket, wrong hat. Or maybe I just stepped out of my car at the wrong time. With a whoop they were on me, surrounding me, laughing. What great fun.

Then one of them shoved...

"What is seen with one eye has no depth."

I'm thinking, as I ponder the wisdom of Ursula LeGuin, that American culture is at the end of what it can accomplish with its single-eyed vision. For all our material progress, for all our ability to dominate just about anything or...

"As long as a nukeless world remains wishful thinking and pastoral rhetoric, we'll be all right."

Pastoral rhetoric? This, from a writer who later refers to a "nuclear umbrella"? The words are those of David Von Drehle, an editor at large for Time magazine, who couldn't resist a faint note...

I may be wrong, but I think Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because the selection committee was feeling as soul sick as I do at the ebbing of humanity's great opportunity to corral global militarism and fundamentally reprioritize.

Obama's election last year rode on global aspirations for...

I don't know if words can transform the world -- I know they can't bring back a murdered child -- but I have a few of them to scatter on the grave of Derrion Albert, the Chicago boy whose brutal slaying two weeks ago stunned the city and the nation:

World leaders can't seem to hold an economic summit without security forces at the level of an occupying army running roughshod over the host city. This is both a symptom of what's wrong with our global economy -- predicated on war, domination and scarcity -- and a metaphor for how...

This talk was delivered on Sept. 25, in Band-e Amir, Afghanistan's first national park, in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Central Afghanistan, Bamiyan Province, in connection with the United Nations International Day of Peace four days earlier.

I post it here to let the great hope for peace radiate...

Right up there with "our mission," in the pantheon of sacred foreign policy mumbo-jumbo, is "training Afghan security forces," that endless, multibillion-dollar prerequisite for our departure from the country.

We've been training a local army and police force for eight years now to take on the good and noble task...

"Businesses exist to serve the general welfare. Profit is the means, not the end. It is the reward a business receives for serving the general welfare. When a business fails to serve the general welfare, it forfeits its right to exist."

Do Adam Smith's famously forgotten words of caution for...

"Most of the time, we are grievously feeling that we're not getting anywhere and that in the ongoing Afghan tragedy, 'peace' or 'humanity' is a rather impractical, ridiculous thought. But there's a remnant of the human spirit left in the Afghan smile and that helps to keep me going." --...

The situation in Afghanistan is serious. We're getting "out-governed" by an enemy so ruthless it's bringing services to a desperate people ignored by the legitimate government we installed.

But our eight-year quagmire . . . excuse me, war . . . can still be won, says Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the...

I don't begrudge William Calley his remorse about My Lai, but I'm hesitant to acknowledge his apology for it.

If you steal $10 from your mother, you need to apologize. If, as you carry out orders, you lead a raid on a village that slaughters 500 or more defenseless...