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Quick Read By Sue Wunder Correspondent I have never meditated by conscious choice; it just happens sometimes. My mind goes utterly quiet, inviting new fill. In my days as a dairy farmer, it often happened as I milked the cows or sat on my tractor. I would lose any semblance of thinking beyond the contours of the animals, the undulating fields. When the milk tank filled, or that final middle row of fragrant, dried meadow grass curled into form behind me, I’d wake as if from a curative sleep, ready for the world of ideas, anxieties, anticipations, and plans.

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The Sahel is awash in jihadi insurgencies. From Nigeria to Mali, the stakes are high. About a million people have been displaced by conflict in Burkina Faso alone, where hundreds of people have died. But is negotiating with militants part of the answer, or a serious misstep? A short-lived truce in Burkina Faso and a handful of other local talks highlight a debate about whether government officials or local leaders should pursue talks for peace.  Why We Wrote This What costs are acceptable to pay for peace? A handful of local negotiations with insurgents in the Sahel puts a spotlight on a deb...

Kabul, Afghanistan Inside Ms. Sadat’s Beauty Salon in Afghanistan’s capital, Sultana Karimi leans intently over a customer, meticulously shaping her eyebrows. Make-up and hair styling is the young woman’s passion, and she discovered it, along with a newfound confidence, here in the salon. She and the other young women working or apprenticing in the salon never experienced the rule of the Taliban over Afghanistan. But they all worry that their dreams will come to an end if the hard-line militants regain any power, even if peacefully as part of a new government. “With the return of Tali...

Three women who became friends – Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward, and Martha Coffin Wright – agitated to end slavery and to bring women’s rights.