There's a particular quality to December light—the way it slants low through bare branches, casting long shadows that seem to stretch backward into all the days we've lived. It's fitting, perhaps, that as one year closes and another waits in the wings, we find ourselves naturally turning inward, taking stock, measuring the distance traveled. But in all this accounting of goals met and missed, of victories and defeats, we sometimes overlook the most fundamental ledger: the one that tracks who...

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...