Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause.

The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.

While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction

...Environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public.

In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.

More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century. The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.

Half a million women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.