Nancy Gibbs Quotes
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What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.
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When National Guardsmen shot four unarmed students at Kent State, virtually the entire system of higher education shuddered and stopped.
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The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
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Time is valuable; people are busy.
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It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.
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Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.
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It's the experts in adolescent development who wax most emphatic about the value of family meals, for it's in the teenage years that this daily investment pays some of its biggest dividends.
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Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.
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Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what's left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school.
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My husband and I don't have sons, so we never had to ask ourselves how we'd have felt about them playing football.
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Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they'll go and the shape they'll take.
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Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you're not looking.
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Anyone with the right mix of parental paranoia and entrepreneurial moxie can make a fortune by selling parents the equipment we think will keep us one step ahead of our kids.
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In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.
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Obama was elected on a slogan of hope and change because both were in short supply: the military exhausted by two wars, the banks failing their public trust, the U.S. Congress a comedy of dysfunction, and a federal government that seemed designed to idle on the sidelines.
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Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.
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Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war - and the troubles that flow from it.
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Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.
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Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
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Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
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While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.
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The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance?
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The typical white American woman in 1800 gave birth seven times; by 1900, the average was down to 3.5.
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America's presidents tend to die young. Maybe it is in the nature of the men who reach such heights, or of the job once they attain it.