Refusing an Award
Making an enemy of the Daily Mail is a little like putting your head in a lion's mouth. But Hari Kunzru, one of Britain's most promising young novelists, did just that when he refused an award because of the papers' consistent "hostility towards black and Asian British people."... posted on Dec 11 2003, 1,619 reads

Corporate Volunteers
CEO's of GE, Levi's Strauss, Pitney Bowes and Walt Disney all agree on one thing -- being a good corporate citizen influences business success. Donating a percentage of company profits to charity, giving employees four hours a month out of the office to do volunteer work, buying recycled products or setting up a recycling program are practical day-to-day business considerations that actually imp... posted on Nov 26 2003, 2,618 reads

Born blind, mentally retarded, autistic and weighing one pound, doctors wondered if he would survive. Today, Tony DeBlois plays 20 instruments, sings in several languages, knows 8000 songs and is forging a career in the music industry. You may not have heard of him; in an era when popular images are often the result not of talent but of high-powered media campaigns, Tony's marketing strategies a... posted on Nov 19 2003, 1,042 reads

The Internet makes it easy to share. Almost too easy, some say. Three years ago, the music industry sued Napster, the first popular music file-sharing network on the Internet. But what if people prefer to share their creative works (and the power to copy, modify, and distribute their works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law? A professor at Stanford Law School, Lawr... posted on Nov 06 2003, 947 reads

According to a Business Week/Harris poll, 95 percent of people think that corporations should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities. So attorney Robert Hinkley had a few words that he'd like to tack onto the corporate world. Just twenty-eight words, to be exact, that will protect the environment, public health, workers' rights--as ... posted on Oct 28 2003, 1,481 reads

When she returned the call on the borrowed cell phone, she warned the man to "stop joking." Hearing that she was the winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," Lateefah Simon cautioned the bearer of $500,000 that "this is a really hard year. Don't play with me." But for this 26 year old, it was real. The MacArthur Foundation, for the last 25 years years, has been awarding fellowships -- "g... posted on Oct 21 2003, 941 reads

The Little Engine that Might
He didn't set out to help Third World countries but he just might end up doing it! Dean Kamen, the technologist famed for inventing the self-balancing Segway scooter, has developed a machine that he thinks can bring two desperately needed things -— electricity and clean water -— to the villages of Africa. He has spent millions of his own money on it and has even given it a nickname: slingsho... posted on Oct 16 2003, 1,288 reads

Pavarotti Teaches for Free
Opera legend Luciano Pavarotti announced that he's going to become a teacher, pass on his experience to aspiring singers. After a difficult year, in which he lost his mother, father and a baby son during child birth, he boldly declared, "I'm going to teach for free."... posted on Oct 10 2003, 1,548 reads

She waited, near death, for eight hours before a British man happened along. She would ride 14 hours over rutted roads, in three different vehicles, before landing in a hospital in Thailand. She was bedridden for more than a year and has undergone 20 surgeries. Nearly two years after the accident, for her 40th birthday, she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, sat at the top and contemplated what she reall... posted on Oct 08 2003, 1,222 reads

When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web - dubbed OpenCourseWare - the academic world was shocked by MIT's audacity ... and skeptical of the experiment. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and ... posted on Sep 06 2003, 1,321 reads