Enough about leaning in already. If women in the U.S. lean any further into debating Sheryl Sandberg's book of the same name, we're going to suffer from a gender-wide case of vertigo. The whole debate drives me a little nutty, and I have been trying to figure out why.

Despite that I'm writing about the charitable deduction, this is not really a piece about taxes. Which is good, because I don't know a lot about taxes.

As someone who has done social services and poverty work for a long time, however, I do know something about the social contract....

God bless Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to lose my right to carry some card I'm supposed to be carrying by saying that, but I'm sticking to it. And I'll tell you exactly why. Because they talked about poverty.

In fact, they didn't just talk...

Halloween happens in a few days. Each year, my daughter picks a costume that is nearly impossible to reproduce, or identify. My favorite was the year we turned her into Hedwig the white owl from the Harry Potter books and at almost every door someone said, "Oh, look, an angel...

Sometimes my colleagues at work worry my blogs might make it seem like I'm going after one political candidate more than the other. That's not my intent. But when someone gets caught in a humdinger, I have no qualms going after what he said. And what Mitt Romney...

Picture the following scenario.

A fifteen year old boy expresses fear for his life to his mother. He is repeatedly harassed by another group of boys. They beat him up after school twice in a six-month period, knocking his teeth out the first time, and then knocking his newly-restored teeth...

If you live in America, and not under a rock, you probably heard that the Fed announced earlier this week that U.S. wealth fell nearly 40 percent from 2007 through 2010. To be more specific, Bloomberg News explained it this way:

The financial crisis wiped out 18...

The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that two Cuban film stars may have defected on their way to the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Last week, Raul Castro criticized President Obama for calling for democratic reforms in Cuba at the Summit for the Americas,...

Last week or so, the South by Southwest Technology Conference in Austin, Texas (SXSW) caused a tremendous amount of controversy by employing homeless people to walk around the conference space as human 4G wireless hotspots. The conference, as described by the New York Times, "has become...

The Republican presidential race is giving those of us focused on poverty a lot of fodder. The latest comes courtesy of Mitt Romney in Florida with his now-famous, if unfortunate, sound bite, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." Romney complains that the quote was taken out of context. Even...

Probably too much already has been made of Newt Gingrich's meteoric re-rise to popularity during last week's South Carolina primary. The world has moved on to Florida and the State of the Union. Still, the combination of cynicism and deflection Gingrich used in his celebrated (or notorious) debate appearances does...

"You better watch out, you better not cry... "

"Teacher says every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings... "

"Mom, how does Santa get around the fire without getting burned?"

"[Bleep] Santa. He never brings us anything... "

Try to imagine these quotes coming at you over...

I'm a big believer in convergence -- those moments where the same idea or belief gets repeated in the fourth, fifth, or sixth different place and it tells you maybe that idea's time is ripe. We have been experiencing just such a moment around the American Dream. More people are...

The Occupy Wall Street movement, while disjointed, offers the basis for a national conversation about economic disparity.

Everyone involved in the movement seeks to change the status quo. People who have felt ignored are fighting against disenfranchisement.  The question for the movement now is how they push the right levers...