Marc Silver

What do you call someone who runs a successful business that aims to make the world a better place? A CEO with a conscience? A do-good bottom-liner?

At the Skoll World Forum this week in Oxford, England, the preferred term is social entrepreneur. In fact, the conference is completely ...

It seems like a simple goal: All kids should go to primary school.

People began talking about it in the 1960s. And they kept talking about it. "Everyone thought it was pretty doable; it wasn't too big of a deal," recalls Aaron Benavot, director of UNESCO's Education for All ...

It's hard to think about Yemen in a hopeful way. In fact, the country seems like the very definition of hopelessness.

It's the poorest country in the Middle East. Al-Qaida is on the scene. And Yemen is now in chaos. Internal factions are on the verge of civil ...

Oh, those goats? I got them from Amazon!

The online giant is testing out a "Home Services" line. You can get a TV mounted on your wall. You can find a plumber. And you can rent a herd of goats to chomp on unwanted vegetation in your yard.

I typed ...

This Easter, you can toast the Bunny with the newest jelly bean flavor from industry giant Jelly Belly: champagne. (Don't get your hopes up — the champagne bean is alcohol-free.)

But it's not as if jelly beans even need a boozy boost to attract customers. Americans buy 16 billion beans ...

"An epidemic is one of the few catastrophes that could set the world back drastically in the next few decades," Bill Gates warns in an essay he wrote for the March 18 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

In the article, titled "The Next Epidemic — Lessons ...

You sure don't want to get tuberculosis. You'll cough a lot, maybe cough up blood, have fever, chills and chest pain. But most cases of the bacterial disease are curable after taking the two first-line drugs for four to six months.

You really don't want to get multidrug-resistant TB. That's ...

Newspapers around the world have reported that elephant was to be served at a $1 million birthday party for Robert Mugabe, the prime minister of Zimbabwe, held on Saturday.

"It just demonstrates that he does not care what the world thinks, nor does he have any respect for wildlife," ...

Joe Biden and John Travolta don't seem to know when they're getting too close for comfort.

Last week, the vice president went up to Stephanie Carter, the wife of the newly named secretary of defense, and put his hands on her shoulders and whispered in her ear. She did not ...

President Obama gave a shoutout to the beauty of the "backwaters of Kerala" when he visited India last month.

So our intrepid village correspondent in India, Wilbur Sargunaraj, went to make a video about it. Off he went to the southwestern state, whose canals, ocean beaches, mountains and ...

In Berlin, David Hermlin is a 14-year-old who wants to be a star — and is well on his way. He plays drums and guitar, dances and sings. He performs with his dad's jazz orchestra. He even writes songs.

But Hermlin has another life as well — as a global ...

Here at Goats and Soda, we can't resist a good story about goats. (See our story about how you know if your goat is happy.) The same goes for soda.

So we were intrigued to learn that soda plays a part in a new book called How ...

It's a scary time to be an altruistic American abroad. The death of Kayla Mueller of Prescott, Ariz., is a sobering reminder of just how dangerous the world can be for aid workers.

Mueller had a big place in her heart for displaced Syrians. She'd worked with the

On Jan. 15, 15-year-olds around the world took a stand. Their goal was to make the world a better place 15 years from now by getting rid of poverty and disease. They shared their worries and their dreams with leaders around the world as part of the newly launched "action/2015" ...

If you want to be a pessimist about the shape the world's in, just turn on the news. It seems as if we're living in an age of terrorism, war, refugees, hostages and natural disasters.

If you want to look on the rosy side, read Michael Elliott's essay on Time ...

The Google doodle for Kenya today shows a white-haired man at a table in a primary school, earnestly writing a classroom exercise. The kids behind him grin as if to say, "He is kind of old to be a first-grader."

Well, yes, he is! In 2004, Kimani Maruge went ...

Our blog was born in 2014, and I'll let you in on a little secret: We had a really hard time coming up with our name (see: "Why Goats? Why Soda?").

But that naming struggle was nothing compared to figuring out what to call the parts of the world ...

Last week, the Taliban attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing more than 140 people, most of them schoolchildren.

In a country where only 57 percent of elementary-school age children attend school, how will this massacre affect efforts to bring more youngsters into class? And what are the ...

If a guy wearing pajama pants and a necktie and sunglasses rang your doorbell and asked to make a video of your home, you'd probably slam the door so fast you'd shatter his lenses.

That's not what happened when Wilbur Sargunaraj went calling on various homeowners in his father's home ...

So perhaps you noticed a post I wrote last weekend about how you know if your goat is happy. Yes, scientists do study that.

The story had a cute picture of a goat at the top, taken by a photographer in Dakar, Senegal. The farmer told the photographer that ...