Beauty and Science: A Conversation with Ed Johnson
As this distinguished molecular biologist says, "the ultimate decision of whether or not a piece of data is going to get used is completely subjective! To put it analytically, you look at your piece of data and you decide whether or not you think it looks pretty." He continues, "Scientists devote not just a great deal of energy in thinking about their problem, but devote a great deal of personal e... posted on Mar 1, 3293 reads

Coach Donates Kidney To Star Player
A college coach has stepped up to the plate for one of his players with an amazing gift. Wake Forest University baseball coach Tom Walter just donated a kidney to freshman outfielder Kevin Jordan, a 19-year-old he recruited last year. Jordan's family was not compatible and could not donate their organs; Coach Walter tested himself and was found to be a perfect match. According to the National K... posted on Feb 27, 1382 reads

Life is 'Baeutiful'
Do you remember the name of your kindergarden teacher? I do, mine. Her name was Mrs White. I don't remember much about what we learned in her class, but my mother once told me that we used to write a lot. And I would bring back what I wrote and she would look at it and see there were so many mistakes. But no red corrections. And always a star. Sometimes even a Good! scrawled in that would make my ... posted on Feb 25, 16403 reads

Japan's Unlikely Hero
They can be seen all over Japan. Springing up in shelters and cities. Molded in the hands of dedicated volunteers. Nourishing tired faces, the recipients both young and old biting into them with smiles on their face. One of the quiet heroes to emerge in this time of grave crisis in Japan is the humble little white ball of rice called onigiri or omusubi. Portable, substantial, and lasting surprisin... posted on Mar 30, 3637 reads

Quiet Justice: Teaching Mindfulness to Lawyers
"When I tell people that I teach a class in law and meditation at UC Berkeley's law school, I often hear snorts of disbelief," Charles Halpern laughs. But the class is no joke. It's part of a groundbreaking movement that has quietly been taking hold in the legal profession over the past two decades: a movement to bring mindfulness into the practice of law and legal education. To a career that tops... posted on Mar 31, 13082 reads

Why Gratitude Is Good
"Count your blessings," we're often told -- but what good does that do us? Plenty, according to Robert Emmons, the world's leading scientific expert on gratitude. After a decade of research, Dr. Emmons has found that people who practice gratitude have stronger immune systems, feel happier and more optimistic, and are more generous and compassionate. In this thorough article from Greater Good magaz... posted on Jun 20, 78299 reads

Why Can't We Be Good?
Philosopher and professor Jacob Needleman maintains that humans have the capacity for great good. In his book "Why Can't We Be Good", he explores what causes us to go astray, and what can help us to stay focused on what he believes is our purpose: to serve. In his book and the interview, offers one practical way of keeping on track--deep listening. Based on experience with many groups of students,... posted on Apr 28, 12701 reads

The Art of Joy
Is artmaking selfish? In this interview, artist Gale Wagner reflects on art as a grateful response to fulfillment, as an expression of joy, and as a way of serving it forward. "We're so fortunate. Do you realize that a third of the world's human population isn't going to have fresh bath water or fresh drinking water? And look at this! I'm wasting it washing my car! The only antidote, I believe, is... posted on May 22, 3352 reads

5 Manifestos for Art, Life & Business
Manifestos are a powerful catalyst. Famous architect Frank Loyd Wright said that "an eye to see nature, a heart to feel nature and a courage to follow nature" were three of his top 10 manifestos. By publicly stating our views and intentions, manifestos create a pact for taking action. If we want to change the world, in ways large or small, developing a set of principles that we believe in and cons... posted on Jul 22, 6853 reads

Learning to Love Uncertainty and Failure
Edge Magazine called for eminent scientists, philosophers, and artists to submit responses to the question, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's toolkit?" The results have recently been published online. A common basis among the responses was that many people currently misunderstand the scientific process, undervalue the need for scientific doubt, and fail to recognize the role of fa... posted on Jun 25, 5498 reads

Where Poetry Comes From
"I think poetry always comes out of what you don't know. And with students I say, knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen, above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know all of your knowledge is important, but your knowledge will never make anything. It w... posted on May 25, 5020 reads

Raising Kids to be Less Stuff-Centered
"Too often, we turn to acquiring stuff to meet our emotional, social, recreational and other needs. This consumer-mania isn't good for our resource-stressed planet, isn't good for our family budgets and ultimately doesn't work. We have more stuff than previous generations could have dreamed of, but we also have less leisure time, fewer friends and spend less time with our kids." Annie Leonard, aut... posted on Aug 14, 10294 reads

Bill Moyers: Naomi Shihab Nye
Renowned poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes about button-hooks, onions and her grandmother's tea. Her poems speak of ordinary things -- things we take for granted until it's almost too late. For her poetry is a "conversation with the world, conversation with those words on the page, allowing them to speak back to you -- conversation with yourself." The daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mo... posted on Jul 7, 5514 reads

Forgiving Her Son's Killer
It would be easy for Mary Johnson and Oshea Israel to be enemies -- he killed Johnson's only son. But their first face-to-face conversation took a remarkable turn. "You were not that 16-year-old. You were a grown man. I shared with you about my son." At the end of their meeting at the prison, Johnson was overcome by emotion. "The initial thing to do was just try and hold you up as best I can," Isr... posted on May 23, 5207 reads

Using Soccer to Turn it Around
Lisa Wrightsman used soccer to turn her life around, and now she's using it to help others do the same. Wrightsman was in a semipro league, but later succumbed to drugs, alcohol, homelessness and jail. Last year, however, she entered a Volunteers of America recovery program and discovered their street soccer program. With soccer as her pivot, she made a big shift in her own life, and then saw the ... posted on Jul 29, 4025 reads

100 Places to Go Before They Disappear
Last year, global carbon emissions hit a record high, and the latest science tells us that we're almost certainly locked into roughly 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. It might not sound like much, but 2 degrees Celsius will redraw maps, change landscapes, and force cities to deploy aggressive adaptation measures. A new book by Abrams Books, 100 Places to Go Before They Dis... posted on Jun 4, 15035 reads

Female Auto Mechanic Breaks Stereotypes
Aside from a thin coat of powder, there's nothing superficial about 32-year-old Sarah "Bogi" Lateiner. Big-hearted and brilliant, Bogi graduated Phi Beta Kappa and did it in three years with a double major in pre-law and women's studies. Her plan was to go to law school and become a champion for women on a global scale. Although in the end, she decided to go with her plan B, instead. "I had in my ... posted on Jun 10, 5557 reads

5 Classic Commencement Speeches
It's graduation season, so commencement addresses by actors, politicians, writers, musicians and other luminaries are sweeping the world of higher education, sharing advice ranging from the humorous to the profound. Even for those of us that aren't students, it becomes an opportunity to reflect on the most compelling, provocative and deeply inspirational speeches of years past. This article highl... posted on Jun 14, 15541 reads

The Reading Promise: An Extraordinary Father-Daughter Story
When Alice Ozma was in the fourth grade, her family was going through a rough patch. Her parents had just split up, and her older sister had recently left for college. Ozma was suddenly spending a lot more time alone with her dad, Jim Brozina, an elementary school librarian. So Ozma and her father made a pledge: to read together every single night for 100 days. But after 100 days, they just kept g... posted on Jun 19, 4675 reads

Soap That Saves Lives
Perhaps he noticed because his father was a soapmaker in Uganda. When Derreck Kayongo learned how much soap was thrown away by hoteliers in the US, and that 2 million children die each year due to a lack of santitation, he decided to do something about it. He started Global Soap Project. Volunteers across the U.S. collect the hotel soaps and ship them to the group's warehouse in Atlanta. On Saturd... posted on Jun 22, 3125 reads

The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See
Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike, navigate the wilderness alone, and recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark. Since his infancy, he has been adapting to his blindness in remarkable ways. He has learned to use what he calls "Flashsonar," or echolocation. He produces a brief, sharp click with his tongu... posted on Jul 5, 9829 reads

9 Interviews with Creative Visionaries
"I love a good interview. To me, there's nothing so useful for demystifying the creative process as hearing an artist or entrepreneur speak from a very personal perspective about how, and why, they do what they do. This weekend, I combed through my archive of epic and inspiring interviews and came up with this shortlist. Straight talk from Ernest Hemingway, Dieter Rams, Patti Smith, Steve Jobs, An... posted on Jul 13, 14935 reads

High Schooler Pays Forward $40,000
They wanted to show kids in Compton, CA, one of the most dangerous cities in America, how to create community spirit, and so organizers put on a basketball contest for top academic students. But following a tear-jerking gesture from the winner -- it appears the true lessons learned were by the adults. Senior Allen Guei won in front of a packed house. And three months after winning the $40,000 top ... posted on Jul 8, 14453 reads

The Power of Feedback Loops
The premise of a feedback loop is simple: provide people with information about their actions in real time, then give them a chance to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Why does putting our own data in front of us somehow compel us to act? In part, it's that feedback taps into something core to the human experience, even to our biological origins. Like any organism, human... posted on Aug 1, 5994 reads

How He Crossed the Finish Line
In 1992, Derek Redmond was running the race of his life -- the 400-meter dash at the Summer Olympics. In the previous Olympics, he was forced to withdraw 10 minutes before the race due to an Achilles injury but now he was he was ready and heavily favored to medal. His father was in the stands cheering. The race began and 175 meters into it, he pulled his hamstring muscle and collapsed on the groun... posted on Jul 19, 7344 reads

Secrets to Longevity
They say that the key to a long life is eating well, exercising regularly and reducing stress. Now an eight-decade study indicates that this is only part of the equation. The Longevity Project tracked the lives of 1,500 boys and girls to explain how factors such as social connections, personality and marriage affect long-term health. The results flipped traditional logic on it's head. "Take dispos... posted on Aug 10, 17309 reads

The 3 Stages of Generosity
How do you think about generosity? In this recent TEDx Talk, Nipun Mehta shares his experiences with generosity, broken down into three stages: Give, Receive, and Dance! When you give, you find that the compassion felt around you is contagious and it, in turn, creates a community. When you receive, you discover abundance, you realize generosity exists in so many different ways. And finally, when y... posted on Aug 9, 5220 reads

Friendship Balloons
When 9 year old Sara-Beth Martin let out red balloons in her send-off party a week before her second heart surgery, little did she know that one of them will travel 180 miles to reach 8 year old Reanna -- struggling with troubles of her own. The balloons carried a simple request of praying for Sara for her successful surgery. Reanna knew adversity and pain herself -- she lost her mother to cervica... posted on Sep 18, 3273 reads

7 Ways to Have More by Owning Less
Stuff. We invariably accumulate it and often times develop a certain emotional attachment to it. To some extent, it's the effect of increased marketing, but it is also our own conditioning. Fortunately, new digital platforms and cloud-based tools are making it increasingly easy to have many of the things we want without actually owning them. Because, as Wired founder and notable futurist Kevin Kel... posted on Aug 11, 92224 reads

Her Heart Was Bigger Than This Room
It is a tragic story, but one that touches and inspires. For her 9th birthday, instead of getting presents for her, Rachel Beckwith asked loved ones to donate to charity:water, a nonprofit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Her goal was $300, enough to give 15 children access to clean water, but she only got to $220. A month later, tragedy struck, when her fami... posted on Aug 17, 10921 reads

A Morning When Everything Fell Into Place
"I finally found a Motel 6 about twenty-five miles east. When I got there around 11pm, from the cars and people I saw -- it was still warm outside, maybe 85 degrees -- I got the impression I was deep in gang territory. A young couple checking in at the office counter ahead of me added to this impression. I was nervous and felt out of place, but ended up getting a good night's sleep. In the morning... posted on Aug 26, 12026 reads

Dogs with Custom Wheelchairs Inspire Rehab Patients
Cruising in their custom wheelchairs, Chili and Arlo are the center of attention wherever they go. But for patients at the Baylor Institute for Rehabilitation in Dallas, these two canine caregivers are also an inspiration. "Many of the patients are new to wheelchairs," Linda Marler, the program's director told TODAY.com. "When they see Chili and Arlo, they say, 'If those dogs can do it, so can I.'... posted on Sep 7, 10335 reads

Unexpected Gestures of Compassion
"Through some incredible good luck no one was seriously hurt but the experience was very frightening. There was so much smoke that my first thought was to just get out of my car as fast as I could. I could hear the children from the car behind me screaming and crying as I was trying to claw my way out of my car. When I got out, I could see their mum was frantically trying to comfort her shaking c... posted on Sep 22, 4283 reads

Recycling Soap and Saving Lives
That bar of soap you used once or twice during your last hotel stay might now be helping poor children fight disease. Derreck Kayongo and his Atlanta-based Global Soap Project collect used hotel soap from across the United States. Instead of ending up in landfills, the soaps are cleaned and reprocessed for shipment to impoverished nations such as Haiti, Uganda, Kenya and Swaziland. "I was shocked ... posted on Oct 1, 4097 reads

Connected: Love, Death, & Technology
"From the beginning of time, every new technological advancement has brought with it a complex mix of positive and negative repercussions as well as unintended consequences. I set out to make a film that addresses the potential of our twenty-first-century technologies and the importance of harnessing their powers. I also wanted to examine what can happen when these new technologies take over and s... posted on Oct 3, 21424 reads

National Treasures: Wild Horses, Wild Kids
Jean Albert Renaud sleeps in a barn. His bedroom shares a wall with the stall of a stallion named Incitatus. On winter nights, he can hear the wind whistling across the hills, but Renaud (or Jar, as he is known) is warm in the company of his eight horses. He sleeps there because he wants to. Jar's life has never been conventional, but today it is focused on his noblest effort yet -- preserving and... posted on Oct 4, 7990 reads

How to Live a Single-Tasking Life
Multi-tasking is no longer about being productive -- it's a way of living. It's not a sane way of living, however, and it's not necessarily the most effective way of working either. Imagine instead, a single-tasking life. Imagine waking and going for a run, as if running were all you do. Nothing else is on your mind but the run, and you do it to the very best of your abilities. Then you eat, enjoy... posted on Oct 5, 39837 reads

The Art of Seeing
Something happened to successful artist Jane Rosen when she came to California -- something that changed the trajectory of her work. "The exposure to the beauty of the place -- the coast, the hills, the redwoods -- made a deep impression. One day, as she stepped out of her house, she looked up and saw a red-tailed hawk soaring above her. "As I stood looking up at the hawk, in a voice as clear as d... posted on Oct 9, 6489 reads

25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer
Today, writing well is more important than ever. Far from being the province of a select few as it was in Hemingway's day, writing is a daily occupation for all of us -- in email, on blogs, and through social media. It is also a primary means for documenting, communicating, and refining our ideas. As essayist, programmer, and investor Paul Graham has written, "Writing doesn't just communicate idea... posted on Oct 13, 34093 reads

Why Do Some People Learn Faster
Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? A new study by Jason Moser at Michigan State University is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using EEG. The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is mostly involuntary. The s... posted on Oct 19, 13538 reads

Becoming a Presence Activist
"A friend of mine is visiting from out of town and staying in East Oakland, in an area that's infamous for its gang violence and unrest. This friend happens to be a monk. He shaves his head and dresses in the traditional brown robes of his monastic order -- not the kind of person who blends easily into the background. Having spent many years making compassion a conscious practice, his response to ... posted on Oct 18, 22841 reads

Secrets of the 100-yr-old Marathoner
Most people hang up their boots as they get older, but Fauja Singh only began running in his eighties. At the age of 94, he ran a full marathon in less than 5 hours, but on 16 Oct 2011, at the age of 100, he still has it in him. Singh did what no other person has done: he became the oldest person and the first centenarian to finish a marathon. Along the way, he's received sponsorship deals, but he... posted on Oct 21, 42316 reads

A Case Study of Anonymous Giving
"Giver Girl" and her husband "Giver Boy" came up with a simple yet powerful idea: donating $52 to a different charity every week for a year. After each experience, they post their moving reflections, invite others to join in, and maintain total anonymity. The brilliance of their project is captured in a week when they spontaneously decide to make that week's gift a $52 tip to a waitress serving th... posted on Oct 25, 15789 reads

The Decision-Making Flaw in Powerful People
The decisions made by powerful people in business and other fields have far-reaching effects on their organizations and employees. But new research finds a link between having a sense of power and having a propensity to give short shrift to a crucial part of the decision-making process: listening to advice. Power increases confidence, researchers say, which can lead to an excessive belief in one's... posted on Oct 26, 11183 reads

An Amazon Tour Guide's Inspiring Story
Nearly 21 years ago, Patty Webster landed her dream job as an adventure tour guide in the Peruvian Amazon. But as she shared the area's beauty and culture with tourists, she realized there was a darker side to the rainforest paradise. "I saw how poor they were and realized that people were dying because they didn't have medical care," Webster said. She started sharing her supplies with the locals ... posted on Nov 7, 3803 reads

8 Approaches to Simplicity
Uncluttered, Ecological, Family, Compassionate, Soulful, Business, Civic, Frugal. According to Duane Elgin, author of the classic 'Voluntary Simplicity,' these eight words constitute distinct aspects of simplicity. "As these eight approaches illustrate, the growing culture of simplicity contains a flourishing garden of expressions whose great diversity -- and intertwined unity -- are creating a re... posted on Nov 10, 19185 reads

When Generosity Meets Venture Capital
What happens when someone who has spent much of his life on volunteerism and generosity keynotes an event for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs? "My instructions for the talk were: don't be humble, talk about scale. I actually laughed out on the phone, when I heard that, only to realize that it wasn't a joke. The other keynote was a billionaire, who had invented 33 medical devices and held 150... posted on Nov 14, 34438 reads

Is This a Business or an Art Project?
"To call Robert Fogarty an accidental entrepreneur is a bit of an understatement. If you haven't heard of Fogarty's Dear World, a venture that grew out of a not-for-profit fundraiser called Dear New Orleans, it's likely to hit your radar screen soon. He's a photographer whose striking portraits feature people with heartfelt messages written on their hands, arms, and faces in black marker. The imag... posted on Nov 27, 3987 reads

Need to Create? Get a Constraint
"One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it's often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of ... posted on Nov 21, 6809 reads

A 15-yr-old Dog's Gift
"I have the pleasure of meeting hundreds of incredible heroes, but this one caught me off guard. Your hair will stand on end as you read the story of this man and this dog who picked one another up time and time again: 'I saw in the front yard what appeared to be a very old dog that was in obvious distress. He would walk in a semi-circle, then fall to the ground, then struggle back to his feet a... posted on Nov 19, 107526 reads