Kristen Meinzer

Taylor Swift was the top-selling recording artist of 2008. According to Forbes, she’s the 69th most powerful celebrity in America. She was recently nominated for more American Music A...

John Irving, the writer famous for such well-loved and critically acclaimed books as "The World According to Garp" and "The Cider House Rules," has just released a new novel: "Last Ni...

Today, President Obama follows up on a campaign promise: He is sitting down with 564 Native American and Alaskan Native leaders as part of the White House Tribal Nations Conference. I...

Thirty years ago today, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two hostages were held for 444 days. Barry Rosen was a State Department press attaché in Tehran in 19...

Voters in Maine voted yesterday to revoke gay marriage in the state. Opponents of gay marriage frequently bring up the hypothetical effects of gay parenting on kids as a reason to den...

If you go to any national park or protected wilderness in the U.S. today, you will find the friendly, heroic figure of the forest ranger: a uniformed caretaker of natural splendor, an...

"Question 1" on Tuesday's ballots in Maine, much like last year's "Proposition 8" in California, would explicitly revoke recently granted marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples i...

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer famous for her inventive and dark novels — including "Oryx and Crake," "The Handmaid's Tale" and "The Blind Assassin" — talks with us about scienc...

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) may be best known as the first openly gay member of Congress. But he has been representing Massachusetts's Fourth Congressional District since 1981 and has...

It might seem that globalization is a continuing and ominous threat to America's workforce. New York Times business correspondent Micheline Maynard, however, says foreign companies ca...

According to a recent study, child abuse cases went up 35 percent nationally between 2001 and 2007. In one hospital in Phoenix, child abuse cases are up 40 precent over last year alon...

Last week, we looked at how some banks were canceling consumer credit cards without warning and how consumers could avoid it by using their cards more. That discussion sparked a debat...

United Nations inspectors arrived in Iran yesterday for a three-day visit of its recently-disclosed uranium enrichment facility. The visit comes after Iran said Friday that it needs m...

In this weak economy, more and more Americans are filing for bankruptcy. Contrary to what you might expect, the biggest reason people are doing so isn’t excessive spending or job ...

The 35th Annual National Conference of Black Mayors convenes today in Las Vegas. In honor of the conference, we put together our own roundtable of black mayors to talk about issues th...

As more and more of us choose to go online for our news, the question persists: Are news outlets — whether digital, broadcast, or paper-and-ink — financially sustainable in the long-t...

This month, the U.S. Congressional Oversight Panel released a new report that looks at how effective goverment efforts have been at stemming the tide of foreclosures. It questions whe...

Everyone’s talking about the "Balloon Boy": not just about the hoax, but about the Heene family in particular and reality TV families in general. What does Falcon Heene's story tell u...

The Takeaway's Farai Chideya speaks to Anna Deavere Smith about "The Value." Today we present the first installment in a new multimedia series called “The Value,” hos...

For decades, motivational speakers like Tony Robbins have told us that positive thinking can vastly improve our lives. But Barbara Ehrenreich, the writer famous for the 2001 bestselle...