Steph Thompson

"Give us your poor, your tired, your hungry... "

It is that promise made to people from all nations that we think of when we see the long arm of Lady Liberty reaching out, holding up the welcoming torch to all wayward citizens, everywhere.

They have poured in to...

I saw him pushing his walker, on wheels, down the steep public library ramp.

"Do you need help?" I asked.

He looked up at me quizzically, his weathered face more wrinkled as he squinted against the sun, his full head of grey hair waving slightly in the wind....

A few years back, my new friend from a writing class, I'll call her Nancy, invited me out for a drink in the West Village. Before too long, in front of a curious bartender badly pretending not to pay attention, she let on about her passionate pastime, her inclination to...

Finding themselves newly single in their 40s, my friends have epiphanies about themselves as if they have been reborn, as if who they see in the mirror is someone new. It is not always pretty, that vision, the one they have to present to others to judge.

"My skin..." one...

Every Monday faithfully, for years, I have brought my children to Hebrew School.

"Why?" a friend asked once, innocuously enough, a few years back. I got angry.

"Why? Why? Because we're Jewish..." I'd said.

I argued, afterward, to others, over-explaining when mostly people couldn't care less, that...

My Facebook is a cemetery of once and would-be lovers, souls that, at one time, could have saved me. Could they still?

When I first reconnected, or even now, occasionally, a voice from the dead says I look great or that my kids are cute. Thanks, I say. What else...

I wrote about packaged-goods marketing and the impact of food on health for more than a decade, typed the words "obesity crisis" so many times I thought my fingers might bleed. But what this country needs to do to improve its health and stem the tide of rising healthcare costs...

"A fearful society is easier to govern," my friend said sadly one day over lunch recently, in town, in New York, from Cambodia. She has run free elections all over Asia, tried to instill democracy in places where there are dictatorships, tried to give voice to the voiceless.

I...

The easy answer to the recent shooting in Tucson would be to say it's Arizona's loose gun-control laws that let it happen, that if maybe the NRA-loving Conservative Cowboys in the Wild West would keep it in their holsters, young Jared Loughner wouldn't have been able to ruin his own...