San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, who’s running for mayor, has a decision to make, whether or not to charge 88-year old Alan Purdy. Purdy who had sat there while his wife, Margaret, 84, took 30 pills and secured a plastic bag over her head, called the paramedics after she died. Her life had…

Esther Duflo, a MIT economist known for her data driven analyses of poverty, recently gave a provocative lecture at Harvard. Her data showed, she explained, that the absence of optimism plays a large role in maintaining people trapped into poverty. Hopelessness manifests itself in any number of ways. One for example is called pathological conservatism,…

My last surviving uncle just died, he was almost 90 but the trajectory of his life was not 9 decades but how he began and where he ended up. He was born in a small North African fishing town, to a father overwhelmed by the forces of life, prejudice and colonialism and a mother who…