Contrary to popular misconception, the majority of homeless people aren’t the drunks we see sprawled across sidewalks. The majority are women and children. Kathryn Edin, a researcher who lived among the poor for many years, draws this conclusion in her block buster study of poverty
Want your son or daughter to be admitted to the university of his or her dreams? You can if your child lives abroad and you are willing to spend between $15,000 – $30,000. For that sum, a consultant will pad an admission packet with a false history and false recommendations. Acc
The stock market is going through a hiccup phase, a series of ups and downs which, I suppose, is better than the plummet of 2008. Still, constant fluctuations are nerve-racking, so when I saw an article on investing by the “Oracle of Omaha,” Warren Buffet, I gave it my attention.
I mentioned earlier that Susan Stoner, author of the Sage Adair mystery series, and I are preparing for our YouTube book program, “Just Read it.” Our first 5 airings begin with a review of top paperback sellers listed in the New York Times. Recently, she and I met to compare notes
I went to a conference last weekend, one of those all day affairs that starts with coffee and bear claws, is followed by a high caloric lunch and ends with coffee and cookies in the late afternoon. To my right, at my table, sat a portly woman with a pleasant face. She was biting into
Woman on the Scarlet Beast will be produced in January 2015 and since I made that announcement, readers have queried me about what it takes to get a play staged. As this will be my first and probably my last work for theater, I’ve decided to document the process and publish the epis
Scientists are beginning to think that play, rather than competition, is the ruling principle of the universe. Play, in this case, means an entity’s free exercise of its powers for no higher purpose than because it can. (“Do Atoms Play?” by David Graeber, The Baffler, excerpted
Now that big data collection is here, there’s no way to put the genie back into the bottle. That’s what Craig Mundie, Senior Adviser at Microsoft thinks. He suggests people who spend time arguing about how to control data mining are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
A friend of mine is going through some adversity at the moment. When we met for coffee, I did my best to cheer her up. Trouble, I reminded her, can be the source of insight. As she’s a writer, I pretended my remark would bring a smile to her lips. An artist is supposed to suffer, ri
Before she died, I had a phone conversation with my stepmother who was 98 years-old at the time. I asked her how her day was going and she cheerfully replied she’d had a wonderful morning visiting her mother and father. She wasn’t lying. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s diseas