Don Berwick: Health Care as a Loving Relationship
For the past 30 years, Donald Berwick has been one of the nation's leading authorities and innovators of quality and improvement in the U.S. healthcare system. A pediatrician by training, a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the School of Public Health, and a top health care administrator during the Obama Administration, Berwick challenges administrators, policy makers, and doctors to go... posted on Jan 26 2021, 5,212 reads

Social Distance: A Community-Style Poem
In the early weeks of the pandemic last year, "NPR asked listeners to respond to art with a poem -- a style of poetry called ekphrastic. For inspiration, Kwame Alexander, NPR's poet in residence, selected two paintings: Kadir Nelson's Heatwave and Salvador Dali's Young Woman At A Window. Both show women inside looking longingly out into the world. The paintings struck a chord with those experienci... posted on Jan 25 2021, 5,202 reads

Fatherland
"When I was growing up, my father worked for a United Nations agency. His job meant that I was raised a nomad, moving to a different country every few years: Tanzania, Italy, Ethiopia, Uganda, and England. Annually, my father was granted what the UN calls 'home leave.' When we stepped off the plane in Ghana's capital, Accra, my father would sometimes turn to me, spread his arms wide, and say, "Akw... posted on Jan 24 2021, 3,460 reads

Lisa Dolby Chadwick: Letting in the Light
Chadwick talks about her struggle to keep her San Francisco gallery afloat in the pandemic. Emailing her list, she began pairing poems with paintings from her artists. "With that first one, I paired Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, "So Much Happiness" with a great John DiPaolo painting. I was doing it five days a week. Responses came back from all over the world, really personal ones from people I don't k... posted on Jan 23 2021, 3,098 reads

Kiss the Ground: The Soil Story
"Science meets inspiration in this tale of nature's best hidden innovation: soil. 'The Soil Story,'made by Kiss the Ground, is a five-minute film that shares the importance of healthy soil for a healthy planet. Learn how we can "sequester" (store) carbon from our atmosphere, where it is harmful, and pull it back into the earth, where it belongs, through regenerative agriculture, composting, and ot... posted on Jan 22 2021, 5,740 reads

Amanda Gorman: The Miracle of Morning
Amanda Gorman has achieved many firsts, including being the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate in the United States at age 19. On January 20, 2021, the 22-year-old Gorman read at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. What follows here is a video of her reciting "The Miracle of Morning," a poem written several years ago "when hurricanes, hate crimes, and deportations were some of the many ... posted on Jan 21 2021, 8,915 reads

A Reset for Unprecedented Times
"We are currently living amid a planetary climate emergency, a global pandemic, uprisings against state violence upon Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples, and a failing economic system the world over. Pandemic lockdowns have forced major lifestyle changes: shifting consumption habits, realizing how deeply connected we are to each other and the environment, and focusing more on the non-material as... posted on Jan 20 2021, 4,672 reads

The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance
"As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?"... posted on Jan 19 2021, 11,057 reads

Creativity & COVID-19
"In some recent discussions with friends who are also creatives, I have heard a variety of responses to the question, 'How has Covid-19 affected your creativity?'Some have been inspired to create new work. Others have spoken about a year of fallowness. It's a term we rarely if ever hear in a culture devoted to--or better put, obsessed with--constant productivity. Take agribusiness: every acre and ... posted on Jan 18 2021, 6,043 reads

To Walk in Beauty Once Again
"Fragility sticks to everything alive like the quiet wetness of morning dew
in this global pandemic
as a doctor
I see this fragility
Threatening to swallow so much of what we love
like a large red blanket covering a small bed
and I can't unsee it."
So begins this powerful poem by Sriram Shamasunder, a physician whose work takes him to the front lin... posted on Jan 17 2021, 7,491 reads