“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." --Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture As I climbed the branch and pulled myself up a little higher, I could begin to make out the village below, nestled between the towering mountains. The sun was disappearing behind the darkening peaks, and what was left of its light was shining through the clouds with a golden glow. “This is something you would see on a postcard,” I thought...

When Abraham Lincoln folded up the scrap of paper from which he had read his address at Gettysburg, he never could have known that his two-minute oration would still be stirring the souls of citizens of every stripe more than 150 years later. Lincoln referred to his vision that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Those carefully chosen words in 1863 defined a country wherein democracy could flourish while treating people...