This week I had the pleasure of being contacted by a reporter from the Orange County Register (our local paper) with the question: "Q: Why do so many people enjoy going to scary movies, or putting...

Annie--one of my best SF friends who used to allow me to boss her around at an ad agency where we used to work together--once taught me a good lesson about perfectionism. She spent a day at a...

Our society is confronting many serious, chronic medical issues, including AIDS, diabetes, obesity, cancer, Alzheimer's, MS, heart disease, and autism. What do all those conditions have in common? Every one is something you live with for a long p...

The limit testers, the ones who will always find out how far they can display a certain behavior and get away with it. The ones who always seem to be thinking two or three steps ahead of you.   ...

Schools in the United States have severely curtailed or eliminated physical education and performing arts programming because of the need to score higher on standardized tests in order to receive...

Can it be that we are finally realizing that humans aren't created to make litters? In the beginning--that is in the early days of reproductive technology--we were wowed with the amazing feats of medical science. One day a woman is infertile, the next...

I have no more idea than any media consumer about the particular motivations for Nidal Malik Hasan's killing spree at Fort Hood yesterday, and today's rampage in Orlando shows, of course, that violent behavior does not come with a job description. But...

Sherman Alexie is such a beautiful writer that I want to let his words stand on their own. This is from his new collection of poems and short stories, War Dances. ON AIRPLANES by Sherman Alexie I am always amused By those couples-- Lovers and...

I write on medical issues, never on shootings. But bear with me for one second, forget about the shooting and think of malignant diseases. These are detected through medical means, so as to be treated in early stages, thereby trying to prevent harsh...

"Commercialism is a vacuum," my mother warned me. "It will suck you in." I was seven or eight years old and my mother was running a bath for me. I imagined being sucked down the drain into a wet underworld of nefarious Disney characters. I was...