The opening credits of Mad Men are the most disturbing and haunting for me. It is 9/11 and the images of the businessmen falling from the twin towers. Yet they are falling past images of consumerism and ads which sell the "best" of America ... in silhouette.

My father was...

I was very happily surprised in New York last week to see an example of "art brut" or outsider art -- a piece by Henry Darger -- hanging alongside works by Beuys and other "mainstream" artists who are well appreciated by the "official" art market. In a period...

We need to stop listening to our mothers who tell us that if we want something from a man we have to be subtle enough to make them think they actually came up with the idea in the first place! We should take Norway as an example to follow and...

According to foodconsumer.org:

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has not only given immunity to the makers of Tamiflu and Relenza for injuries stemming from their use against swine flu, she has granted immunity to future swine flu vaccines and 'any associated adjuvants.' The last time...

After the birth of my daughter, the happiest days of my life were when microcredit pioneer, Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, and Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America. Now, once again the sagesse of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo...

Last March, Dr. Drew Pinsky wrote about "Narcissism and the Economic Crisis?" for the Huffington Post.

And I think it is time to look even more deeply into this disturbing trend. There are simply more and more narcissists than there were a few decades ago. There is less community...

"A single ruler could, by fiat, decide which enemies were legitimate representatives of a state and which, by contrast, were mere 'bandits'..." - Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations

In June of 2001, I was in Gothenburg, Sweden, to witness both then...

The latest news from the Bruni-Sarkozy here in Paris household is that the French might start officially measuring more than just the GDP, but will begin accounting for, well, happiness.

So I began thinking about how happy I am living in France. Well, we earn a lot less salary-wise, but...

This tiny village near the Cap Lardier protected coastline in the South of France is the perfect place to spend the last week of summer. These past two months have been draining, more work and less sleep than I had imagined. It is only now, during this final week before...

I grew up in a place where many of the young men and women I went to high school with considered a future in the financial industry. Some went on to get MBAs, some are money managers, some bankers, some deal makers. I am very interested by Economics, and the...

Last summer now seems to have had an air of Great Gatsby-ish endings, and now a bittersweet cooler summer wind blows. The warmth still reaches us, by human means now, not accouterments, and we need one another now more than ever to keep warm. We are indeed all connected, and...

My daughter and I spent the solstice in the heart of Paris, first at the Swedish Cultural Center with its May pole, childrens' songs and dances, flower wreaths on their heads...and then moved from courtyard opera concerts to street corner jazz with masses of friends and Parisians as June 21...

A good friend of mine, Brigitte Marti, a French scholar living in the US, is married to a French doctor who works both at Johns Hopkins and in a French hospital, and has been organizing meetings with concerned citizens and the US Congress for some time to discuss the future...

I recall Muhammad Yunus talking about how the workers at the Grameen Bank loved working with the beggar program, which extends tiny microloans to beggars to help them buy things they can sell door to door. Dr. Yunus' patience with this wonderful program was exemplified when he would respond...

I spent a few years working with film festivals, and because of the stress, the endless needing to schmooze, entertain, deal with egos etc etc, I simply checked out. It did not seem to be enough about the movies and filmmakers and creative talent, but more about buzz and parties...

An Uplifting Story for a World in Financial Crisis! The multi-talented Phyllida Lloyd, director of Mamma Mia!, the highest grossing film ever made by a woman (and a team of women at that) has attached herself to the development of a feature fiction film based on the spread of microcredit...

One thing I learned very early on during these past few years of meetings with Muhammad Yunus is that he TRUSTS people, and because of that, people trust him. He trusted poor women with no collateral and gave them microloans, and they proved to him that they could pay back....

Arrival in Baltimore last week, where the life expectancy for some humans is lower than that in Bangladesh. Riding public transport, light rail, train and metro to the World Health Care Congress in D.C., where Bangladeshi Banker to the Poor Muhammad Yunus taught doctors and CEOs in the health industry...

There are a great many similarities between two US presidential trips to global meetings, overlapping with their first trips to Europe during their presidencies. In June of 2001, then President George W. Bush, arrived in the Swedish coastal city of Gothenburg, just prior to the EU meeting, and he somehow...

There have been two economies operating for too long and the dominant one has been excluding the majority of the humans on this planet. When it did include the poor, it abused them with subprime loans, no profit-sharing, then divided up their hard-earned cash into abstract financial products they all...