Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people--people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal. Mary Robinson's mission would lead her all over the world,...

December 17, 2016 marked the sixth anniversary of the outbreak of the Arab uprisings. In the six years since Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, igniting the uprisings which continue today, the entire Middle East landscape has changed in ways that were unimaginable before. In spite of the early hype about the "Arab Spring" and the prominence observers gave to calls for the downfall of regimes and an end to their abuses, most of the protests...