Nancy Gibbs
The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.Collection: Medical
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.Collection: Courage
I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' But Valentine's Day leaves me cold.Collection: Valentines
The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance?Collection: Technology
Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger.Collection: Anger
Right now, doctors can test for about 2,500 medical conditions, but they only can treat about 500 of those. So what do you do with the knowledge about the others?Collection: Medical
It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.Collection: Change
There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.Collection: Leadership
Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.
Runners exalt the marathon as a public test of private will, when months or years of solitary training, early mornings, lost weekends, rain and pain mature into triumph or surrender. That's one reason the race-day crowds matter, the friends who come to cheer and stomp and flap their signs and push the runners on.
Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.
Rooting from the sidelines is the most democratic of sporting rites: no skyboxes, no tickets required, just an unabashed will to holler and wave.
I have two daughters: One an open book, one a locked box. So the question of privacy is a challenging one. How much do kids need? How much should we give? How do we prepare them to live in a world where the very notion of privacy opens a generational chasm?
'Sesame Street's' genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things - death, divorce, danger - in terms that children understand and accept.
Progress is seldom simple; it comes with costs and casualties, even challenges about whether a change represents an advance or a retreat.
Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.
High school is a haunted house in April, when seniors act up because the end is near. Even those who hate school sometimes cling to the devil they know. And for the kids who love it, the goodbyes are hard to think about.
I come from a family of teachers, and I believe ideas matter; the good ones deserve reverence, and the bad ones, defiance.
Summer is not obligatory. We can start an infernally hard jigsaw puzzle in June with the knowledge that, if there are enough rainy days, we may just finish it by Labor Day, but if not, there's no harm, no penalty. We may have better things to do.
Even if it wasn't always morning in America during the years of his presidency, Reagan's eagerness to insist that it was tapped into a longing among voters. They didn't want to picture themselves turning down their thermostats and buttoning up their cardigans. They wanted to strut again. Reagan opened his arms and said, 'Walk this way.'
Teaching sometimes seems like not one profession, but every profession. We ask them to be doctor and diplomat, calf-herder, map-maker, wizard and watchman, electricians of the mind.
People don't blame the act of driving for auto accidents.
War is being waged all across the country against the invasive plant and animal species - some 50,000 of them - now spreading across the U.S.
Death will never be pretty - its sights and smells too close and crude. And it will never come under our control: it gallops where we tiptoe, rips up our routines, burns our very breath with its heat and sting.
We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.
The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.
I would like to see every newspaper and every magazine have a network of bureaus all over the world, gathering news.
Power is not just political. It can be cultural; it can be spiritual.
I like the fact that glass ceilings are breaking all over.
If anything, the power of the cover of 'Time' has increased as the media landscape has atomized.
Barack Obama wants teacher service scholarships.
Hillary Clinton wants to leave behind No Child Left Behind.
What is it about summer that makes children grow? We feed and water them more. They do get more sun, but that probably doesn't matter as much as the book they read or the rule they broke that taught them something they couldn't have learned any other way.
Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they'll go and the shape they'll take.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.
Professor Obama has at least talked to us like we're adults.
It's hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones.
There's a smartphone gait: the slow sidewalk weave that comes from being lost in conversation rather than looking where you're going.
In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.
You can't predict when a crisis might hit your family, whether it's with an elderly parent or with your children.
As you probably know, I've written a lot about the presidency, so it's obviously exciting when you get to interview a president and write about it.
I've been grateful that 'Time's' reach and mandate is so broad; anything you're interested in, you can usually write about.
I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.
You can't hold up a blog; you can hold up a magazine.
I don't think it's necessary to shout if you have a good story. But I also don't think you should shy away from being bold in the statement that you're making.
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright would baptize Obama, perform his marriage to Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, baptize their daughters, and draw him into the raucous, restless family of faith that Obama had never known before.
When I was coming out of college, storytelling was very much something you did with pencil and paper, so the technological platform versatility, I think, is really valuable.
I've always found that once you're in the door of a place and you have the chance to show how you operate and how talented you are, then anything can happen.
There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.
I'm wondering how many elected figures any of us could find who do not, in the front or back of their minds, remember who does them favors, who doesn't.