Amy Costello

Oscar hopefuls strode down the red carpet on Sunday — walking advertisements for some of fashion's biggest names. But Chanel and Armani weren't the only winners that night.

A brand that targets more modest, socially conscious consumers got attention, too.

It started when Ghanaian actor Abraham Attah showed up ...

Dennis Whittle has worked hard all his life — from teenage days delivering newspapers and scraping paint off wooden bleachers to three decades in international aid and development. In the nonprofit world, he was initially struck by all the good intentions but discovered that aid groups don't always listen to ...

New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar's new book, Strangers Drowning, profiles everyday people who go to extraordinary lengths to help others, even those living on the other side of the world. There's the couple who adopts 20 children, the man who gives his kidney to a complete stranger and another ...

Physician and epidemiologist Gary Slutkin has worked in more than 20 countries, fighting infectious diseases like cholera, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. After a decade abroad, he returned to the United States in 1994 and found an acute problem here: gun violence. He began to study the issue and saw familiar patterns: ...

Teddy Ruge — aka TMS Ruge — has made a name for himself by pushing back against international do-gooders in Africa. The 39-year-old Ugandan-born writer and entrepreneur — who goes by his initials, as his father did — says it's time for the international community to understand ...

Jeremy Smith has written a new book called Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients. It profiles the work of Christopher Murray, a Harvard-trained doctor and health economist who looked at a lot of numbers about how people live and die around the world and found that it's ...

Radio producer Amy Costello talks about her latest radio documentary on medical volunteers in Haiti, and her investigative series, Tiny Spark that explores the "business of doing good."