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She was ten-years-old when we first met, and I was about a year younger. It didn’t matter that I was a Chinese-American girl from the suburbs of Los Angeles and that Katie John was a white girl from Barton’s Bluff, Missouri. We were soul mates, two misunderstood tomboys trying to navigate through the confusing world of our youth — no longer little kids, yet nowhere near old enough to sit at the grown-up table.
My parents were teachers, so we didn’t have a lot of money. However, I had something

On March 15th I wrote about my decision to leave Tokyo. One of my main concerns at the time was that decision-making pertaining to the six overheating nuclear reactors at the Daiichi Fukushima nuclear facility would be too slow. Given that decision-making in Japan is nearly always done by consensus, the time that would be required to form a consensus among various decision-makers would undoubtedly be too long to control the problems resulting from the earthquake and tsunamiu quickly. Time is not a luxury in any crisis, let alone one with the potential for radiation

In the sorting out of the wreckage after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, many Americans have begun paying more attention to a phrase they had barely known — “supply chains.”
American manufacturing companies no longer make most of the parts that they use in production. Rather, both U.S. companies and foreign ones that produce for the U.S. market have long and complex chains of suppliers the world over, many of them in

Although 2008 was the year when America demonstrated that presidential politics was accessible to African-Americans and women, it was the 1984 campaign when the doors were first pushed open. And the two people most responsible for the change were Walter F. Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. Their campaign is most often recalled for the magnitude of their electoral defeat yet an enduring part of its legacy was its commitment to the principle that presidential politics was not simply a preserve of white males.
Prior to 1984, the pool of candidates for national tickets consisted entirely of white

I have written extensively on this blog and in other venues about the barriers that women in technology face: unwelcoming cultures, bias and stereotyping, work-family conflict, lack of access to influential social networks, and absence of role models, mentors, and sponsors.
The awareness of the barriers facing women in the tech industry has grown, thanks to not only to the Anita Borg Institute but also the research and outreach of partner organizations like NCWIT, Catalyst, the Clayman Institute, and Astia, and the vocal work of women’s communities like Women 2.0, She’s Geeky, and DevChix, to name a few. Some individuals with significant influence have also taken up the issue, bringing awareness to the problem (Kara Swisher’s piece on All things Digital, articles by scholar Vivek Wadwha, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg’s TED talk come to mind, as does, ironically, Michael Arringon’s piece in TechCrunch).
Thanks to this collection of voices and hands-on work, it certainly feels like I get fewer and fewer blank stares when people at dinner parties ask me what I do for a living (“what do you mean women are underrepresented and experiencing barriers to advancement in tech? Hasn’t this issue been resolved when women got the vote?”, or: “Anita Borg, is that a reference to Star

Republicans in the House want to balance the budget by denying more than 200,000 little children the opportunity to receive an early education through Head Start; reducing or eliminating Pell Grants for 9.4 million college students; eliminating primary health care services to 11 million Americans; and delaying Social Security benefits to half a million eligible Americans, among other things.
Before Congress cuts funding for Head Start, Social Security, and financial aid for college, we have got to make sure that large, profitable corporations are paying their fair share of taxes.
At a time when we have a $14.2 trillion national debt and a $1.6 trillion federal deficit, it is unacceptable that Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Bank of America, Chevron, Boeing, and other large, profitable corporations are not only avoiding paying any federal income taxes at all but have actually received huge refund checks from the IRS.
Loopholes in the tax code, offshore tax havens, tax breaks to companies that export American jobs to China, and other tax breaks have allowed giant corporations in America to receive billions in refunds from the IRS.
Meanwhile corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash on hand, and big banks have nearly a trillion dollars in excess reserves parked at the Federal Reserve.
In 2005, one out of four large corporations paid no income taxes at all even though they collected $1.1 trillion in revenue over that one-year period.
In 2009, Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits. Not only did Exxon not pay any federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to SEC filings.
Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.
Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.
Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year, received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.
In 2008, Goldman Sachs only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and

I’ve always been inspired by a certain caliber of woman born in the late 1800′s, who then went on to blaze a trail in the early decades of the 20th century, breaking ground for a later generation who claimed “women’s liberation” as their mantra.
They were among the first generation of women in modern times to go to war during the years 1914-18, and were profoundly impacted by the losses of young men in that conflict. The 1921 census revealed that over two million women in Britain alone would never marry or have children, instead facing a life of spinsterhood alone. There were those who floundered, but many moved into public life and a “man’s world” as never before. Gertrude Bell — writer, explorer, cartographer, historian, politician, intelligence officer — was one of the older members of that generation, and her life has fascinated me for years.
Born in 1868, she was the grand-daughter of politician, Isaac Lowthian Bell; it is through her grandfather that she likely garnered an early interest in international affairs, travel and

The energy picture in this country is fast becoming ridiculous. While people are suffering to fill their tanks with $4 dollar a gallon gasoline and small businesses avoid new hiring on the back of rising energy costs, we are literally throwing away our domestic energy supplies — just throwing it away.
It’s sad but it’s true. The newest and most exciting domestic find of crude oil in this country is in the Bakken region of South Dakota, in the middle of nowhere on the Northeastern corner of the state.
It may not look like much on the map, but the Bakken represents an amazing find of conventional crude oil and natural gas: Surveys expect the Bakken to yield as much as the total proven reserves of crude oil in the entire United States, as much as 20 billion

The uprisings in the Middle East and the growing austerity-induced unrest among workers in the US and Europe have provided new hope for environmental movement leaders who for years have struggled to mobilize the pubic to confront the looming catastrophes of growth-capitalism.
A good example is climate leader and 350.org founder, Bill McKibben. In February, McKibben authored a short blog post celebrating Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s decision to step down. He wrote of the revolution as a teachable moment for the climate movement, suggesting that if “a real people’s movement” could bring down an apparently immovable tyrant like Mubarak a similar movement could bring down the fossil fuel giants.
McKibben is right. As the overlords of the current world order, fossil fuel companies do have a lot to fear from a powerful popular

To mark this year’s World Theatre Day (March 27) I want to blend two very true things:
Theatre is an organic byproduct to the human experience on this earth
This earth is very old and still going
There is a rather mind-blowingly cool organization based in San Francisco called The Long Now Foundation. Started in 1996 (or 01996 as they would write it), the Long Now folks hope “to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” And “to provide counterpoint to today’s ‘faster/cheaper’ mind set and promote ‘slower/better’ thinking.”
I thought… where does theatre live in The Long Now?
Stewart Brand, in his book The Clock of The Long Now, shows us this diagram of the timing of various cosmic currents.
copyright The Long Now Foundation.
Nature time is slowest — fashion/art (although I might correct this to be ‘pop art’) time is

Since the dawn of civilization thousands of years ago, the broader Middle East has been a crucible of conflict. Foreign armies have waded in, often with good intentions, to bring peace and impose order. Almost without exception they have failed. Yet once again the Western world seems to believe that it is immune to the lessons of

“I must admit, I am kind of tacky. I am kind of like a Vegas show girl,” Zandile Blay said during our interview, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Her penetrating beauty and intelligence can pull off anything from a burgundy mohair bolero to a college sweatshirt. To say that Zandile simply has great taste — see her Norma Kamali camouflage sleeping bag coat for reference — would not do her discerning good eye and integrity in everything she does justice.
Zandile comes from a long line of political journalists, particularly her father, who won a fellowship from Harvard for his nationwide protest against the Ghanaian regime, where Zandile was

In the program for his new Broadway show, Ghetto Klown, John Leguizamo notes that he’s “re-created” some of the events of his life to bring more “clarity” to his story. These kind of liberties are common when adapting real-life events to the stage, yet, in Leguizamo’s case, you wind up wondering if he could have done more to clarify his overall point. It’s not a question of the comedian’s conception but rather the show’s execution.There are too just too many tangential stories that aren’t central to the protagonist’s long journey to acceptance, stardom, and self-assurance that get in the way of the actor’s self-reflective moments.
His honesty and forthrightness is commendable – this production is rife with consideration of the relationship between truth and memories – but the show fails to provide much insight into Leguizamo’s motivation to remain a Hollywood actor in spite of his own disillusionment and dismay with the state of the industry. If the production were more focused and structured, it could reveal something about the pressures on rising young actors who hope to make inspiring movies and meaningful

Sure, marathon training is all about physical endurance. But do you know the nutritional musts for finish line success? We sat down with resident Nutrition Advisor Alyse Levine to get her take on how to best recover post-run with the right nutritional choices. Here, her expert insight.
Q: When most people think of marathon training they initially think about the physical training schedule and what that will entail. How important is nutrition in the marathon training process?
Nutrition plays a critical role in the marathon training

Welcome to the ongoing discussion about living your best life after 50. Each week, I post an article to ignite a discussion about the challenges and joys of midlife. Please read, share, comment and engage! The more people involved in the conversation, the more we’ll all connect and learn from each other. If there’s something specific you’d like to discuss, I’d love to hear from you.
Last week, I posted an article (“Afraid of Aging? Five Ways to Fight the Fear”) that generated a lot of discussion here and on

If we consulted the health statistics kept by the rich countries club, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, we might not be too surprised to find that the United States has the highest rate of obesity, at 30.6 percent. What country, would you guess, is number two? Mexico … with an adult obesity rate of 23 percent.
That’s a new development on a couple of levels. It’s a sign of Mexico’s economic progress that the country is a member of the

Whether it begins with a trial separation, or moves directly to divorce, the break-up of a marriage is a difficult and painful experience for everyone involved, especially for children, even under the most amicable of circumstances.
While mom and dad may find themselves deeply questioning their own life choices, their child may be quietly questioning how they may have contributed to their parents’ parting. Their reactions may include anger, depression, anxiety, sleep-loss, as well as a fear of being separated from mom or dad.
Some kids seem to have an almost infinite capacity to take the cares and responsibilities of their parents’ relationship onto their own shoulders, all too readily blaming themselves for whatever difficulties their mother or father may be facing, especially when it comes to marital disagreements or difficulties.
Their behaviors, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, can often change. A child who once may have enjoyed sleepovers with friends or going away to camp may suddenly become a reclusive homebody, refusing opportunities and invitations to engage with the world.
Others react by seeking to spend as much time as possible away from their familiar surroundings and parents, associating them with pain and

The New York Times last week issued an entertaining challenge to some of our best-known poets: to Write a poem on Twitter, subject to its 140-character limit. You can read the (mixed) results of this daunting challenge. Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky punned on the word “characters,” Claudia Rankine boldly meditated on the tsunami and Elizabeth Alexander fully embraced Twitter’s unique dialect and syntax (which I loved). For Alexander, the Twitter forum was “just enuf 2hold/1 xllent big word.”
But if The New York Times fancies itself to be on the cutting edge of merging literature and technology, it would be

Let’s explore the myth that psychiatric conditions aren’t as well defined as other medical diseases and psychiatric treatments aren’t supported by as much scientific evidence, and don’t work as well, as other medical treatments. Even my fellow psychiatrists believe this. I’ll take broken limbs and that sort of thing out of the equation and go on from there.
Are psychiatric conditions nothing more than labels for normal behaviors? Is a person with social anxiety disorder just a shy person? Is depression just an experience we all have to live with during hard times? What makes a super-punctilious person a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder? It’s true that some psychiatric conditions exist on a continuum with normal reactions, normal states of

“Barn’s burnt down — now I can see the moon.”
This evocative Haiku written by Mizuta Masahide, a 17th century Japanese poet and samurai, has spoken to me deeply since I adopted my treasured son Neal, who has taught me the gifts of leading a purpose-driven life. I aspire each day to be of service to those, like my family, who live with autism and “special needs.” In fact, I founded The Miracle Project so others could come to “see the moon” each day by being Miracle Minded.
My heart is full as I witness the courage, grace, cooperation and compassion at the core of our Japanese brothers and sisters’ culture.
In this unimaginable moment of crisis, we hear nothing about looting food or material goods in order to survive, but rather, we learn one story after another about Japanese citizens’ instinct to share each bit of food, shelter and clothing with in those in their midst, be they family, stranger, elder or infirmed.
How extraordinary to witness sharing, compassion, generosity, connection, understanding, patience, grace and unconditional love in the most desperate of times. What a blessing to learn of the boundlessness of the human spirit in moments of scarcity as well as abundance.
When disaster strikes and we are brought to our knees, I believe we come to know who we are and what we are made

The new Broadway show, The Book of Mormon, opened on Thursday to rave reviews and has immediately become one of the hottest ticket on the Great White Way. Since the show is written and produced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the guys who brought us “South Park,” the project had been met with intrigue from its onset; now, though, thanks to all the accolades, some are second-guessing whether the show is so controversial after all. Mormons have even reportedly been fans of the show.
Larger questions still loom. As Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, who both happen to be Mormons, considering presidential runs in 2012, what’s “unclear is how the Mormon faith will play” in the run-up to the election, reports USA

The entrance to The Ritz-Carlton Spa by ESPA on the 116th floor of the hotel.
There’s a dark side to my job that people often forget about: The deadlines (which are still standing no matter what time zone you’re in), the lack of sleep, the jetlag, the way your body feels after it has flown more than 20 hours from one side of the world to the other. The painful feeling you get along the backside of your legs when within seconds of deplaning a last-minute redeye flight to Hong Kong you have to immediately put on a pair of high heels and go into a business meeting. By the end of day two, you can’t feel your feet and your shoulders are permanently hunched over until someone helps you stand

A colleague of mine was reciting the litany of his nonstop schedule: business meetings here, dinner parties there, small children at home. At one point he said flatly, “I’m just trying to squeeze in as much as I can.”
I doubt he thought of his statement as a mantra for our society. Yet it sums up the urgency that has ingrained itself like a primal drive in our society and our souls.
Why? Why are we trying to squeeze in as much as we can?
Surely, as Lynn Casteel Harper laid out in her recent post, our culture and our marketplace push us hard in that direction. We all know the

The race for the Republican nomination for a candidate to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012 will probably be over within fourteen months at the most. Accordingly the race is beginning to take shape. At this time there are probably significantly more candidates exploring the possibility of a campaign, considering the race or trying to figure out whether or not they can win the nomination and the election, so the field of candidates will probably get smaller between over the next six months.
The Republican race for the nomination has the potential to be extremely entertaining and much more open with a far greater degree of uncertainty than any recent Republican nomination battle. It also has the potential to have an impact on the Republican Party for the next decade or