The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
My take is that the optimal approach to food, for health and ethical reasons, may be vegetarianism.
Zimbabwe has far fewer tourists than South Africa or Kenya, and there's less crime as well.
One of the things you learn as a journalist is that when there's no accountability, we humans are capable of tremendous avarice and venality. That's true of union bosses - and of corporate tycoons. Unions, even flawed ones, can provide checks and balances for flawed corporations.
Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.
However imperfectly, subsidies for the poor do actually reduce hunger, ease suffering and create opportunity, while subsidies for the rich result in more private jets and yachts. Would we rather subsidize opportunity or yachts? Which kind of subsidies deserve more scrutiny?
The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.
Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.
One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.
All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.
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.
A little bit of attention can go a long way.
You don't need to invade a place or install a new government to help bring about a positive change.
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.
While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction.
