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

I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there.

America's education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

China was probably the worst place in the world to grow up female 100 years ago. There was foot binding, female infanticide, concubinage, and child marriage, and now it's one of the better places. So I really do feel that we're on the right side of history here.

American airstrikes...create risks, especially if our intelligence there is rusty. The crucial step, and the one we should apply diplomatic pressure to try to achieve, is for Maliki to step back and share power with Sunnis while accepting decentralization of government. If Maliki does all that, it may still be possible to save Iraq. Without that, airstrikes would be a further waste in a land in which we've already squandered far, far too much.

If you just try to make rational arguments about why people should care about Congo and how 5 million people have died, then people tend not to be receptive. But once you've created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.

The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.