What did you throw away today? Have you thought about it since? Annie Leonard has. Leonard spent more than a decade thinking about your trash and following it around the world. She has toured landfills and testified to the U.S. Congress regarding international waste trafficking. That work, plus a dozen more years studying environmental issues, inspired her to create a series of films about the things we use every day, yet wouldn’t think worthy of a film: our stuff.

Pessimism is in style. We keep hearing that things have gotten worse. But is that true? Steven Radelet asserts that around the world, people’s lives have improved dramatically over the last 20 years and challenges us to look at the data: Since the early 1990s, 6 million fewer children die each year from disease, millions more girls attend school, and more than a billion people are no longer in extreme poverty…

TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO, Gary Slutkin moved to Chicago to take a break. A doctor trained in infectious diseases, he had spent his career battling tuberculosis in San Francisco and cholera in refugee camps across Africa. Working with the World Health Organization, he played a key role in reversing the AIDS epidemic in Uganda. But he had also spent more than a decade surrounded by suffering and death. "I was exhausted," he says…

Howard Buffett is on deadline. In 2006, his father, investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett, challenged him to do something great in the world – and gave him $1 billion to do it. So he gave himself 40 years to spend every penny in a bold attempt to end global hunger…

HENRIETTA FORE is leading UNICEF at a historic time. There are 1.8 billion young people on the planet between the ages of 10 and 24 — the largest generation of youth the world has ever seen — and they are concentrated in the developing world, where many face poverty, violence, and a dearth of educational opportunities…