When I was growing up, yearning with my pals to be a track star, one of our heroes was Bruce Jenner. He won a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in the decathlon, and he adorned our Wheaties boxes. We all wanted to be Bruce Jenner.

Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you'd think we'd be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there's overwhelming evidence of a continuum.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.

The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.

I was the only one in my family to be musically inclined, and my mother loved that. It encouraged my grand aunt to find me a music teacher, because it was quite obvious music was in me.

At the end of the day, I'm a very boring academic, bogged down with academia and structure and delivering an education.

We're first on executions. We're 49th in funding public education. We're in a race with Mississippi for the bottom, and we're winning.

Martial arts is a life journey. One of the things my teacher taught me a long time ago was that everyone's path to the mastery of a certain system is different. Some people's path is a very direct route, where others might wind back and forth if you are injured or something.