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...

  Our parking attendant, Felix, got fired last week. His customers - a disconnected batch of urban strangers — rose up in revolt. Felix has his job back, and we clients have returned to the anonymity of our various makes and models. But with...

It's been a couple of months since Tiger Woods private affairs dominated national news, and activity on this front has by no means ceased. The gossip tsunami began when Tiger managed to mysteriously smash his car into a tree; his golf-club-wielding...

     I was leaving my last class for the day when I saw my friend, Ken Frankel, working out in the hallway with one of those pistol-grip label makers. I stopped and asked what he was doing.      The Dean asked me to put the room numbers up in Braille...

The connection between creativity and mental illness is well-established but also hugely exaggerated by the media, particularly thanks to Hollywood. Indeed, when the average layman is asked to think of salient cases of artistic (as well as scientific)...

The American Psychiatric Association is in the middle of a historical revision to its diagnostic "Bible", the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM). This book is used by clinicians, insurance companies, and even the legal...