All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.
Katie Couric's Notebook: World water day
Today, on International World Water Day, roughly one in 8 people lacks access to safe water - and waterborne illnesses kill nearly two million every year.
Continue »World Poetry Day: Katie Couric's favorite poems
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I'm not sure exactly when I fell in love with poetry.
Perhaps it was the well-worn red leather-bound copy of A.A. Milne in our library and my mom reading "James, James, Morrison, Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, took great care of his mother, though he was only three," when I was only three. Or maybe it's because I still remember her reciting Robert Louis Stevenson's, "How do you like to go in a swing, up in the air so blue? Oh I should think it's the pleasantest thing, ever a child could do!"
The older I got, the more I fell in love with poetry. I lectured high school students on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when I was in my twenties. I'm sure I wasn't particularly insightful, but it was a lot of fun. When my good friend Jennifer Estess died of ALS a few years ago, I recited William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," because to me, it's about the power of the imagination and the heart over the infirmities of illness or old age.
Continue »Katie Couric's Notebook: Supermoon
On March 19th, the moon will be closer to the Earth than it's been in 18 years. Just a paltry 222,000 miles away. And it will also be a full moon.
Continue »Katie Couric's Notebook: Young drinkers
But if she lived in modern-day America, chances are she'd already have tasted Champagne, beer and probably Four Loko. By 21, Liesl and half her friends would be binge drinking.
Continue »Katie Couric's Notebook: Surviving disaster
It was just one in a flood of news reports pouring out of Japan:
An elderly man sitting on the ground, surrounded by rubble, on the spot where he saw his wife swept away by the tsunami. "I am thinking that I might have closure if I keep sitting here," he said.
Complete Coverage: Disaster in Japan
Continue »Katie Couric's Notebook: Crisis Mapping
The word "ushahidi" means "witness" in Swahili.
The website Ushahidi.org is a multimedia platform for up-to-date maps and social networking messages from all over the world.
That kind of technology has emerged as a high-tech tool in disasters like the Japan earthquake.
Complete Coverage: Disaster in Japan
Continue »Katie Couric's Notebook: Pink Gang
I don't generally support gang-related activity, but in this case I'll have to make an exception.
The Gulabi Gang, or Pink Gang in Hindi, is a group of women from Uttar Pradesh, one of the poorest parts of India. Led by the feisty Sampat Pal, they travel to different villages, clad in pink saris, to defend abused women and confront corrupt officials.
Continue »Katie Couric's Notebook: Voice bank
James Earl Jones once said, "One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter."
For most of us, that probably means not having the strength to say how we really feel. But for a British man named Lawrence Brewer, it's an impending reality.
Continue »Katie Couric's Notebook: Government redundancies
You don't often hear the words "federal government" and "efficient" in the same sentence.
Americans have grumbled about bureaucratic waste for generations. Still, you might be surprised by the level of duplication outlined in a new Congressional report.
Continue »Katie Couric's Notebook: Teen sex
You wouldn't know it from watching the MTV show "Skins," but believe it or not - teen sex is down.
A new federal study found the number of teens and young adults - between the ages of 15 to 24 who have engaged in some kind of sexual activity - actually fell six points in the past decade from 78 percent to 72.
Continue »
