The most dangerous moment for American democracy may not come when those attempting to dismantle it believe they are winning. It may come when they begin to fear they are running...
Liberals and conservatives are not arguing from different moral planets — they are arguing from different maps of the same territory. The territory is harm. The argument is about...
What if changing the world doesn't require a giant leap? Perhaps creating a more loving world begins with the smallest choices we make each day -- one baby step at a time.
You pick up your phone to check one quick notification, and forty minutes later you're rage-scrolling through political arguments, feeling vaguely terrible about your life, your...
Rural communities hit by floods, wildfires, and hurricanes don't just lose homes and crops — they lose the fragile scaffolding that keeps mental health and sobriety intact. The...
The most consequential economic force of the next fifty years is not artificial intelligence, climate change, or geopolitical rivalry. It is something far quieter and far more...
On August 19, the U.S. Treasury quietly announced it would at least double the size of certain debt buyback operations, and bond markets moved immediately. Most Americans...
Somewhere in California, a farmer is staring at cracked earth one season and a flooded field the next, and the bank is not particularly interested in hearing about either....
Every few decades, a generation of young people looks at the world their parents built and decides it needs a serious overhaul. The hippies did it with flowers and folk songs in...
Last year, when Maryland lawmakers refused to act on bills to raise the state’s minimum wage to $10, Prince Georges and Montgomery Counties joined the District of Columbia to create the first regional minimum wage compact at $11.50 an hour
Recently, documents unveiled by ProPublica, the New York Times and the Guardian showed that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are not only capable of accessing your metadata but also capturing information sent by applications on your smartphone.
First of all, the best way to reduce your ecological footprint isn’t to replace a gasoline-fueled car with an electric car. It’s to replace it with a bicycle, a public transit ticket, or a good pair of shoes. Now, of course, the built geography of much of rural and suburban North America makes it a little challenging to do without a car...
The question of how global warming will influence El Niño has been a challenging one for scientists to answer. A new study suggests while the overall number of El Niños is unlikely to increase, particularly strong “super” El Niños are likely to occur twice as frequently in a warming world.
Wealth of half the world’s population now the same as that of tiny elite. Wealthy elites have co-opted political power to rig the rules of the economic game, undermining democracy and creating a world where the 85 richest people own the wealth of half of the world’s population, worldwide development organization Oxfam warns in a report published today.
Asked about the spill of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into a West Virginia river – a disaster that shut down schools and businesses, sent hundreds of residents seeking medical treatment and left an estimated 300,000 Mountain Staters without potable water – Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters that he is “entirely confident that there are ample regulations already on the books to protect the health and safety of the American people.”
A wildfire exploded outside Los Angeles Thursday as record temperatures spread across California, where drought conditions are escalating as the state comes off its driest year on record.A new update to the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that severe drought, the second-worst drought category, has spread across 62.7 percent of the California as of Tuesday.
What we have is a failure to be able to differentiate between fact and fiction, between ordinary and authentic, between virtual and actual, and between believing and knowing. Life is not just about video games and text messaging, game consoles, and tracking the minutia of...
What must be understood is that mental bandwidth is a limited resource which is used for everything. So what happens if we can make some things, like banking, easier for the poor ?
More than 650,000 marine mammals are killed each year by fishing gear. A U.S. law that could help stop the slaughter isn’t being enforced. If you enjoy a plate of fish sticks or a salmon burger from time to time...
More than 50 cafes operate throughout the Netherlands, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and, in the U.S., people have begun convening regularly at coffee shops and event spaces in New York, Chicago, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Seattle and—as of earlier this year—my hometown of Portland, Oregon, to fix busted items.
Deregulation brings us cramped airplane seats and increased TV ads. The skies and airwaves are commons owned by all of us together. That’s the reason why airlines and broadcasting were once regulated—to protect the public’s interest.
When thinking 40 years into the future, people step out of the current political situation, and our sense of what's possible becomes much more expansive. We are not only able to think bigger—we crave it.
The curious thing about a democratic system is that it contains the seeds of its own demise. Freedom is not something guaranteed by any parchment or promise. It is earned by each generation which must jealously protect it from threats, not only from outside, but from within a nation.
Much happened that was hopeful this year — a new pope focused on inequality, successful minimum wage campaigns spread across the country, and the number of states allowing gay marriage doubled. We look at seeds sown this year that could make 2014 transformational...
With proper care and respect, Earth can provide a high quality of life for all people in perpetuity. Yet we devastate productive lands and waters for a quick profit, a few temporary jobs, or a one-time resource fix. For a surprisingly long time, we humans have successfully maintained the illusion that we are outside of, superior to, and not subject to the rules of nature...
Progressive organizations commonly focus on protesting and demanding corrective action to lessen the harms and injustices of a failed economic system. Changing the system is far more difficult and takes far more time, but it is what we must ultimately do.
After surviving near financial meltdown, devastating oil spills, and enormous bank bailouts, we're finally beginning to understand the deep connection between our economic and our political lives. To bring about real change, we'll need some powerful tools...
As national media outlets announced the failure of Washington state’s Initiative 522 — a measure that would require labeling of foods containing genetically engineered ingredients — those advocating for the measure paused. The race was...
The grid — even the proposed “smart” grid — is anything but smart, but is prone to failure, storms, and outages. We need to move to a paradigm where energy is generated where it is used. Once the device is in place, it would be free. Impoverished areas and peoples should have such systems heavily subsidized or gifted to them...
The New Moon arrives in Leo August 12 at 8:36 PM UTC, and with it comes a singular...
Life will always hand us criticism, disappointments, and unexpected challenges. The real...
A study reveals that while many online daters strive for honesty, a notable percentage...
Mars is entering Cancer on August 12 and this shift changes how you move through...
There is a moment most of us remember — standing in front of someone we loved, arms...
Recent research explores the complex dynamics of altruistic cruelty, revealing that...
You imagined the newborn haze would be hard, but you did not quite picture yourself...
What if peace of mind depends not on remembering every hurt, but on keeping only the...