I read an article earlier today about the financial impact on productivity of cigarette smoking: “Early deaths caused by smoking cost the nation about $92 billion in lost productivity between 1997 and 2001, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday” (source: CNN.com). I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that this loss of life […]

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine posted to our circle of friends about feeling painfully shy. After sending my reply — most of which appears below — to her (and cc’ed to the rest of our group), I was surprised to hear how many of us also engage in “practice conversations,” whether […]

Year ago, as my first novel, “Rhythm,” was in the hands of first draft readers, I went to work on a new book project about forgiveness. It was conceived as a series of letters between two fictional characters: a convicted murderer on death-row and the young daughter of the police officer he had killed. At […]

The Supreme Court has ruled that individual state laws allowing the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes do not supercede federal marijuana laws, as detailed in this article from CNN.com: Supreme Court allows prosecution of medical marijuanaMonday, June 6, 2005 Posted: 10:40 AM EDT (1440 GMT) WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal authorities may prosecute sick people […]

A year or so ago, I read something that really made me think. The author made a statement to the effect that human beings have become so distrustful of our own natural abilities that we keep inventing new gadgets and gizmos to do what we can already do ourselves. Essentially, we don’t need graphing calculators, […]

Spoiler alert: Although I think it’s pretty obvious how the characters must progress in Star Wars episode III in order to properly set up episode IV, I still want to alert readers to the explicit detail offered below. I don’t want to upset your movie-going experience, so I’ll understand if you want to wait until […]