What use could the humanities be in a digital age? University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents' nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world.
— Nicholas Kristof
Beware of generalizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to the religious equivalent of racial profiling. Hinduism contained both Gandhi and the fanatic who assassinated him.
When I was born in 1959, the hospital in which I arrived had separate floors for black babies and white babies, and it was then illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states.
We all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We're in a relay race, relying on the financial and human capital of our parents and grandparents. Blacks were shackled for the early part of that relay race, and although many of the fetters have come off, whites have developed a huge lead.
In America, we have subsidized private jets, big banks and hedge fund managers. Wouldn't it make more sense to subsidize kids?
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.
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.
Technology companies must constantly weigh ethical decisions: Where should Facebook set its privacy defaults, and should it tolerate glimpses of nudity? Should Twitter close accounts that seem sympathetic to terrorists? How should Google handle sex and violence, or defamatory articles?
The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
Most of the time in the 21st century, we dominate our surroundings: We tweak the thermostat, and the temperature falls one degree. We push a button, and Taylor Swift sings for us. It's the opposite in the wilderness, which teaches us constantly that we are not lords of the universe but rather building blocks of it.
Most of the time in America, we're surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America's wild places.
If only meat weren't so delicious! Sure, meat may pave the way to a heart attack. Yes, factory farms torture animals. Indeed, producing a single hamburger patty requires more water than two weeks of showers. But for those of us who are weak-willed, there's nothing like a juicy burger.
It's maddening in my travels to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There's something to be said for CEOs' entering politics: In theory, they have management expertise and financial savvy. Then again, it didn't work so well with Dick Cheney.
In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can't drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn't wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies.
Dr. Ben Carson has the most moving personal narrative in modern presidential politics. His mother, one of 24 children, had only a third-grade education. She was married at age 13, bore Ben and his brother, and then raised the boys as an impoverished single mother in Detroit. As a young boy, Carson was a terrible student.
Random violence is incredibly infectious.
The great divide is not between faiths, but one between intolerant zealots of any tradition and the large numbers of decent, peaceful believers likewise found in each tradition.
Anybody looking at the history even of the 20th century would not single out Islam as the bloodthirsty religion; it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe and Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist Asia that set records for mass slaughter.
A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility.
My father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, was preparing a fraudulent marriage to an American citizen as a route to this country when he was sponsored, making fraud unnecessary. My wife's grandfather bought papers from another Chinese villager to be able to come to the United States.
Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.
When I was growing up, yearning with my pals to be a track star, one of our heroes was Bruce Jenner. He won a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in the decathlon, and he adorned our Wheaties boxes. We all wanted to be Bruce Jenner.
In 2013, 71 percent of black children in America were born to an unwed mother, as were 53 percent of Hispanic children and 36 percent of white children. Indeed, a single parent is the new norm.
Worrying about bills, food, or other problems leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.
One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
I can't help thinking that if the American West were discovered today, the most glorious bits would be sold off to the highest bidder. Yosemite might be nothing but weekend homes for Internet tycoons.
The ice bucket challenge went viral in 2014, partly because it was so much fun to watch videos of celebrities or friends dumping ice water on their heads. Videos of people in the challenge have been watched more than 10 billion times on Facebook - more than once per person on the planet.
Our public figures are often narcissists, utterly self-absorbed in their quest for power.
We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.
For all Trump's criticisms of government, his family wealth came from feeding at the government trough. His father, Fred Trump, leveraged government housing programs into a construction business; the empire was founded on public money.
Saudi Arabia isn't the enemy, but it is a problem. It could make so much positive difference in the Islamic world if it used its status to soothe Sunni-Shiite tensions and encourage tolerance. For a time, under King Abdullah, it seemed that the country was trying to reform, but now under King Salman, it has stalled.
In Angola, I visited 'HeroRats' that have been trained to sniff out land mines (and, in some countries, diagnose tuberculosis). In a day, they can clear 20 times as much of a minefield as a human, and they work for bananas!
Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition.
The caricature of Islam as a violent and intolerant religion is horrendously incomplete. Remember that those standing up to Muslim fanatics are mostly Muslims.
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.
The best escalator to opportunity in America is education.
Doesn't it seem odd that your cellphone can be set up to require a PIN or a fingerprint, but there's no such option for a gun?
Gays and lesbians began to gain civil rights when Americans realized that their brothers, cousins, daughters were gay.
You no more have the right to risk others by failing to vaccinate than you do by sending your child to school with a hunting knife. Vaccination isn't a private choice but a civic obligation.
Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.
Too often, I believe, liberals deny that poverty is linked to bad choices.
Remember that disadvantage is less about income than environment. The best metrics of child poverty aren't monetary, but rather how often a child is read to or hugged.
Wilderness trails constitute a rare space in America marked by economic diversity. Lawyers and construction workers get bitten by the same mosquitoes and sip from the same streams; there are none of the usual signals about socioeconomic status, for most hikers are in shorts and a T-shirt and enveloped by an aroma that would make a skunk queasy.
My take is that the optimal approach to food, for health and ethical reasons, may be vegetarianism.
When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.
If I wanted a circus ringmaster, I'd hire Trump. If I wanted advice on brain surgery or hospital management, I'd turn to Carson. Fiorina would make an articulate television pundit. But for president?
Saudi Arabia inflames the Sunni-Shiite divide and sets a pernicious example of intolerance by banning churches.
Saudi Arabia has supported Wahhabi madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with its brutal war in Yemen, intended to check what it sees as Iranian influence.
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.
