The root cause of the looming energy problem - and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health - is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.
To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.
I grew up in Los Angeles when the racial tensions between blacks and Mexicans were very high. Gang violence was very prevalent.
We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challenge is essential to their power and their attraction. War stories matter.
Tensions exist in any free society. But the freedom we enjoy rests on a foundation of individual liberty and shared moral values.
Everywhere in the world there are tensions - economic, political, religious. So we need chocolate.
The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!
There's something really interesting about having those close friends that you've had incredible times with but growing up and away from them. The underlying tensions, the shifting in the group dynamic, the little lies you tell to big yourself up: it's something that happens to us all.
The greatest hope most Americans - including Republicans - had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country's president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.
What made al Qaeda retrieve the doctrine of militant jihad, and Breivik the ideas of crusade and reconquest, is a sense of siege. So, we should help both Westerners and Muslims get rid of that sense by easing their political tensions and by fostering dialogue between them.