Atul Gawande, in an article for The New Yorker, writing about the soaring cost of health care, looks at the role dying and the terminally ill play in those costs:
Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of [...]

In the wake of the recent G20 in Toronto, my friend Annahid and I were talking about the state of social change movements today. Annahid has been on the front lines of social change her whole life, and is founder and senior partner of Anima Leadership Institute in Toronto, which offers leadership programs for individuals, [...]

Last March I posted The Reading Roundup. I got a lot of comments and suggestions from readers, and so I’d like to make this a regular feature, perhaps once a quarter, provided I’ve actually read enough.
So, here is a list of some  books I’ve enjoyed  since the last Roundup, though a few which I forgot [...]

As I’ve written about before, solving the problems of bullying depends on the society’s tolerance for abusive interaction. My good friend and colleague, Dawn Menken, psychotherapist and conflict resolution educator, wrote this thoughtful piece for the Oregonian last week. She raises many thought-provoking questions, and asks us to look at how we define bullying. Until [...]

In a move which I find hard not to characterize as deliberately antagonistic, Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard and City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade are pushing for a vote this week on a resolution to strengthen the citizen police oversight board while Police Chief Rosie Sizer is out of town. This would be the first major [...]

What’s the solution for solving the health care mess? Global warming? The economy? OK, these are bad examples, obviously if we knew, and if it were that easy, they’d be solved. But the question I want to ask is, why do we wait to tackle our problems until they are so complicated, so messy, so [...]

Randy Cohen, the New York Times’ ethicist, recently opined on the court ruling that ordered Google to release the name of the anonymous blogger whose site “Skanks in NYC” was devoted to slandering a fashion model:
Has anonymous posting, though generally protected by law, become so toxic that it should be discouraged?
This issue has gotten my [...]

As promised, I’ve been looking at abuse of power, including bullying, ethical violations, exploitation, and conflict of interest. These past few weeks, I’ve been researching workplace and school bullying. I find the topic to be really disturbing. If the literature is accurate, it’s a far bigger problem than I realized. There’s even a newly coined [...]