Where you were on September 11, 2001? (I bet you remember the day as vividly as I do.) I slept late that morning, having been up on and off all night with my then-six-week-old baby. The first weird thing I encountered was a voice mail from my father assuring me that my brother, who worked […]

In my last blog post, I wrote about the importance of including all major armed rebel groups in peace negotiations. Conveniently, my self-imposed 600(ish)-word limit gave me an excuse to avoid a very difficult question: what if one of those rebel groups (or the only rebel group) is extremist? By that I mean a group […]

A friend of mine belongs to a dinner club. You know the kind: there are maybe 8-10 members, and they take turns hosting a fancy, home-cooked dinner. My friend travels often, and she’s recently gotten frustrated because the decision making–on who’s hosting when, on what the rules are–always seem to be made without her. (She […]

Do you like to cook? I do, when I have the time and energy (which seems to be less and less often lately). I enjoy getting new recipes and giving them a try. But I have developed a healthy skepticism about recipes. A recipe is just one of many ways to accomplish more or less […]

Did you ever see the movie Erin Brockovich? I LOVE that movie. In it, Julia Roberts plays a single mom who works for a law firm and discovers that Pacific Gas & Electric has been covering up its contamination of nearby residential properties. In my favorite scene, her boss, lawyer Ed Masri, is trying to […]

I hope you’re enjoying this Christmas/Hannukah/”Festivus” (“for the rest of us”)/New Year’s break. I’ve spent some nice time with family and friends–have you? I love my family, and I love having friends… which makes this blog post pretty risky, because it might make me some enemies. A few days ago, several members of the UN […]