Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you’d think we’d be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there’s overwhelming evidence of a continuum.
While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren’t actually angry at the president about inaction.
Technology companies must constantly weigh ethical decisions: Where should Facebook set its privacy defaults, and should it tolerate glimpses of nudity? Should Twitter close accounts that seem sympathetic to terrorists? How should Google handle sex and violence, or defamatory articles?
One of the biggest complaints readers have about my work is that I don’t tell them often enough what they can do. I do think this is an area where journalism sometimes falls short. We describe a really grim situation but don’t really explain to people what they can do about it.
The best escalator to opportunity in America is education.
You educate a boy, and he’ll have fewer children, but it’s a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family.
I suspect unconscious bias has been far more of a factor for President Obama than overt racism and will also be a challenge for Hillary Rodham Clinton if she runs for president again.
The news media’s silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.
Too often, wealthy people born on third base blithely criticize the poor for failing to hit home runs. The advantaged sometimes perceive empathy as a sign of muddle-headed weakness rather than as a marker of civilization.
Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.
One death is a tragedy, and a million deaths are a statistic.
It’s easy to keep issuing blame to Republicans or the president.
At some point, extra incomes don’t go to sate desires but to attempt to buy status through ‘positional goods’ – like the hottest car on the block. The problem is that there can only be one hottest car on the block.
I took a gap year myself after high school and worked on a farm near Lyon, France. I stayed with the Vallet family, picked and packed fruit, and discovered that red wine can be a breakfast drink. That led to further travel as a university student.
I have a one-question language test that people who have lived abroad do better on than those who studied in a classroom. Try my test yourself: In a foreign language you’ve studied, how do you say ‘doorknob’?
The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals, but it doesn’t operate in this region. It’s difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut funding.
Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives.
One of my frustrations is that we in society generally have this bifurcation in how we see the world. That’s probably a little less true with business audiences, but in general, there tends to be this view that for-profit companies are greedy, and nonprofits are noble. It’s absolutely more complicated than that.
Humans pull together in an odd way when they’re in the wilderness. It’s astonishing how few people litter and how much they help one another. Indeed, the smartphone app to navigate the Pacific Crest Trail, Halfmile, is a labor of love by hikers who make it available as a free download.
I do think that humanitarians and journalists alike have focused on all the things that go wrong, and that they sometimes leave the perception in the public that the war on poverty has been lost. That Africa is just a bottomless pit of despair. When, in fact, really the opposite is true on both fronts.
In Angola, I visited ‘HeroRats’ that have been trained to sniff out land mines (and, in some countries, diagnose tuberculosis). In a day, they can clear 20 times as much of a minefield as a human, and they work for bananas!
It really is quite remarkable that Darfur has become a household name. I am gratified that’s the case.
The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.
For all Trump’s criticisms of government, his family wealth came from feeding at the government trough. His father, Fred Trump, leveraged government housing programs into a construction business; the empire was founded on public money.
When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.
There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.
If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further, which means working with France to shore up Chad and the Central African Republic.
Most of the time in America, we’re surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America’s wild places.
There are very few things I’ve done just twice in my life, 40 years apart, and one is to backpack on the Pacific Crest Trail across the California/Oregon border.
Young people often aren’t in a position to write checks to charities. But there are two things they can do that are invaluable. One is volunteering, especially mentoring other young people with reading, math or help thinking about college. Through iMentor, one can even mentor people online.
The photos were taken by African Union soldiers. People in Congress saw them. I thought if people could see them, there would be public outcry. No one would be able to say, We just didn’t know what was going on there.
In America, we have subsidized private jets, big banks and hedge fund managers. Wouldn’t it make more sense to subsidize kids?
Worrying about bills, food, or other problems leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.
Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.
A few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.
Saudi Arabia has supported Wahhabi madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with its brutal war in Yemen, intended to check what it sees as Iranian influence.
We all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We’re in a relay race, relying on the financial and human capital of our parents and grandparents. Blacks were shackled for the early part of that relay race, and although many of the fetters have come off, whites have developed a huge lead.
One of the things that evangelicals do really, really well is to make giving a joyous, social enterprise. Too often, the world sees giving as a burden, a sacrifice, when in fact it’s more like an opportunity to help others and oneself at the same time.
We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.
Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.
The wilderness is healing, a therapy for the soul.
Numeracy isn’t a sign of geekiness, but a basic requirement for intelligent discussions of public policy.
Utah may well be the most cosmopolitan state in America. Vast numbers of young Mormons – increasingly women as well as men – spend a couple of years abroad as missionaries and return jabbering in Thai or Portuguese and bearing a wealth of international experience.
One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
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