As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.

The honest answer is more complex. On some level I was sent. Or inspired. Or called. But my calling, such as it was, wasn't a single booming invitation from above (really, is it ever?).

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.