Very few of us can stop our lives and become activists.
If I'm not happy with what's going on, I try to change it myself.
Houston's one of the most diverse urban areas in the entire country, and most people here are really proud of that.
My grandfather arrived in Houston in 1942 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He had lost everything - his profession, his language, his money - but the city welcomed him, as it has hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years.
The beauty of kids is they don't care who you are, which is why people like the Obamas like them so much - they treat them like normal people.
I had to work up the courage to even imagine myself running for Congress. But I eventually decided that our country had a moral problem in only letting white men - even the right-minded ones - have a seat at the table.
I believe in following opportunities.
Calling representatives every single day, arranging local community meetings, and marching in the streets every Sunday. It's not the path to glory, but it's absolutely essential to maintaining a democracy under threat.
I don't claim any great experience or expertise.
I believe that if Democrats - not any one Democrat, and certainly not just me - want to start winning races again, Lujan's statement that the DCCC would fund candidates who oppose abortion rights puts our country in danger and makes it all the more likely that the Republicans will continue to defeat us in election after election.
It's a truism to say that my state, Texas, isn't a red state: It's a nonvoting state.
Ohio has long been an embarrassment to charter-school supporters nationwide, with its trail of scandal and graft and abysmal student performance.
New York City has an integration problem.
The friends I knew who tutored were well paid for work that seemed far less grueling than waitressing or late-night newspaper copy editing or all the other side gigs I attempted in my early twenties.
Don't most of us agree that providing school meals to kids who need them is an overwhelmingly good thing? After all, nutrition is essential to proper cognitive development.
We can all get behind feeding the poorest kids in school, right?
Diversity isn't just a hallmark of big cities anymore.
The celebrity's desire to shape the next generation of young minds by opening a school is by no means unique to Diddy.
I never experienced much outright anti-Semitism. While we learned about the Holocaust - endlessly, it felt like - no spray-painted swastika ever appeared on my childhood landscape. Jewish persecution was an ever-looming reality, but always an abstract one.
What role should religion play in the American public school classroom? My own knee-jerk response would be, 'none whatsoever,' but the Constitution isn't quite so direct on the subject.
