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The Audacity of Despair

Joanne Barkan is a writer who lives in Manhattan and Truro, Massachusetts. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago where she attended public elementary and high schools.

Long form sports journalism from the best doing it today.

It has long been fashionable to say that the globe is shrinking. In the wake of the telegraph, the steamship and the railway, thinkers from the late 19th century onwards often wrote of space and time being annihilated by new technologies.

Close observers of the development scene will have noticed an interesting shift over the past few years. Where once institutions such as the World Bank and charities like Oxfam described their goal as simply 'ending poverty', today they tend to frame things in terms of poverty and inequality.

Introducing The Players' Tribune, a new media platform that will present the unfiltered voices of professional athletes, bringing fans closer to the games they love than ever before. Founded by Derek Jeter, The Players' Tribune aims to provide unique insight into the daily sports conversation and to publish first-person stories directly from athletes.

APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG (SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006) MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg Tuesday, 12 September 2006 Faith, Reason and the UniversityMemories and Reflections Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies,Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium.

I went to report on life in the oil fields and ended up working as a cocktail waitress. Here are some of the crazy people I met and the stories they told me.

New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Did you enjoy the misleading headline we came up with to generate traffic and rig Google results, only it’s a complete misrepresentation from what I wrote this week? What a farce, right? We’ll neve...

As Rock prepares for the release of Top Five, a bittersweet film comedy in which he does triple duty as director, screenwriter, and star.

Past U.S. failure to move forcefully against nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is all the more damning when considering the long list of nations that have been induced to abandon pursuit of such weapons. Countries ranging from Taiwan to South Africa have stepped away from nuclear armament, swayed by the kind of diplomacy the Obama administration is now employing in its dealings with Iran.

by Maria Popova Kurt Vonnegut, J.K. Rowling, David Foster Wallace, Patti Smith, Anna Quindlen, Steve Jobs, and more. The commencement address is the secular sermon of our time - a packet of timeless advice on life, dispensed by a podium-perched patronly or matronly shaman of wisdom to a congregation of eager young minds about to enter the so-called "real world."

On March 28, 2013, only two weeks after he was elected, Pope Francis celebrated Holy Week in a jail in Rome. For the previous thousand years, hundreds of popes had re-enacted Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper, ceremonially pouring holy water over the toes of priests and bishops at the Vatican.

This afternoon, in announcing her support for removing the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley asserted that killer Dylann Roof had "a sick and twisted view of the flag" which did not reflect "the people in our state who respect and in many ways revere it."

Is the mindfulness movement due for a correction?
The UCLA campus was deserted the day I arrived during spring break, its stillness doing little to combat the sense of dread I felt as I made my way to a large conference room. Inside were 10 people of all different ages. They were sitting quietly.

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan-that one was the third of the week-and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference.