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Browse a selection of my articles, divided by topicTopic: COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
A year after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, local Rotary members continue to rebuild homes and lives.
Topic: CONSERVATION
SIERRA PAILEMAN, Argentina — Timidly taking its first steps in the wild, the young condor perches on a rocky plateau as a hot breeze swirls upward from the barren Patagonian landscape…
In 2006, Marshall Saunders, a longtime member of the Rotary Club of Coronado, California, went to see former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. A week later, he watched it a second time. Then a third…
Will climate change bring more poverty? Will we be able to stop its worst effects? Former Rotary scholars and peace fellows who studied environmental issues offer their thoughts. They discuss the struggles they face working to combat climate change, and what solutions give them hope…
Topic: EDUCATION & LITERACY
As Todd Bol was doing a renovation project at his home in Wisconsin in 2009, an idea came to him. His late mother, June Bol…
Dana Suskind’s mantra is written on a whiteboard in her office at the University of Chicago. She developed the easy-to-remember shorthand for parents…
Rotary is forging a path to full literacy in India. Long before he became Rotary International’s president, Shekhar Mehta was known for setting…
When the BBC offered an online quiz titled “Can You Spot the Fake Stories?” I was confident I would do well. With a master’s degree in journalism…
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more…
Topic: GLOBAL HEALTH
I felt like I was entering another world. Beds with paralyzed children lined every wall. I was put into a big room. There were rows and rows of children, probably about 50 children, and three or four nurses to care for us. I was seven when I was transferred to Hope Haven children’s hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, where I spent four months learning how to walk again…
When Alan Rich woke up in the hospital six years ago, the last thing he remembered was standing on the tennis court: "I was about to serve and said, ‘OK, here comes an ace!’" Rich had collapsed from sudden cardiac arrest. The tennis court was equipped with an automated external defibrillator, or AED, which two doctors playing on an adjacent court used to shock his heart…
“Right now, I can see all my patients through my mobile phone,” says Prakash Paudyal, a pulmonologist and member of the Rotary Club of Jawalakhel, Nepal. Paudyal uses a Kubi device to turn a tablet into a “mini-robot” for remote monitoring of his COVID-19 patients who are in isolation at Nepal National Hospital. Paudyal learned about the Kubi and other telehealth practices during a vocational training team trip to the San Francisco area last year…
I am the second officer on a large cruise ship that normally carries about 1,200 passengers and almost 900 crew members. We were cruising from South America to Antarctica when the COVID-19 outbreak started. At first, we felt lucky — there were no cases on board, so we felt like we were the safest place in the world. But after the cruise line announced we would be pausing all operations fleetwide, we docked in Buenos Aires…
INTERVIEWS WITH EXPERTS
What did you throw away today? Have you thought about it since? Annie Leonard has. Leonard spent more than a decade thinking about your trash and following it around the world. She has toured landfills and testified to the U.S. Congress regarding international waste trafficking. That work, plus a dozen more years studying environmental issues, inspired her to create a series of films about the things we use every day, yet wouldn’t think worthy of a film: our stuff.
Pessimism is in style. We keep hearing that things have gotten worse. But is that true? Steven Radelet asserts that around the world, people’s lives have improved dramatically over the last 20 years and challenges us to look at the data: Since the early 1990s, 6 million fewer children die each year from disease, millions more girls attend school, and more than a billion people are no longer in extreme poverty…
TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO, Gary Slutkin moved to Chicago to take a break. A doctor trained in infectious diseases, he had spent his career battling tuberculosis in San Francisco and cholera in refugee camps across Africa. Working with the World Health Organization, he played a key role in reversing the AIDS epidemic in Uganda. But he had also spent more than a decade surrounded by suffering and death. "I was exhausted," he says…
Howard Buffett is on deadline. In 2006, his father, investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett, challenged him to do something great in the world – and gave him $1 billion to do it. So he gave himself 40 years to spend every penny in a bold attempt to end global hunger…
HENRIETTA FORE is leading UNICEF at a historic time. There are 1.8 billion young people on the planet between the ages of 10 and 24 — the largest generation of youth the world has ever seen — and they are concentrated in the developing world, where many face poverty, violence, and a dearth of educational opportunities…