This Thursday, December 4, is the Gemini Moon in Sagittarius – a full moon.  If you know me, you know that I love full moons – well, the clear sky ones, mostly – but I must confess, I also love the cloudy ones.  Look at this photo I took for November’s full moon. Isn’t that stunning? It is calming.  It is mysterious.  It feels like you could stick your hand inside it and push away all of that cottony padding and then be blinded by a special kind of light – a light that heals, tells you about...

In times of political turbulence and division, it's easy to focus on what feels broken in American democracy. Yet even amid our challenges, the foundations of democratic governance continue to provide us with freedoms and protections that much of the world's population can only dream of. Here are twenty-five reasons to remain grateful for the democratic system that, however imperfectly, continues to shape American life. Perhaps most fundamentally, we retain the freedom to criticize our...

Every day, millions of people perform an invisible dance of self-modification. A Latina woman softens her accent in client meetings. A Black professional tempers his enthusiasm to avoid seeming "aggressive." A gay man deepens his voice and adjusts his gestures around colleagues. A woman in a male-dominated workplace laughs at jokes that make her uncomfortable, careful not to be labeled "difficult." This phenomenon —code-switching— happens so reflexively that many don't even recognize they're...