Tonight is Halloween so it’s time for a scary tale. But this one isn’t about ghosts and goblins.  It’s a tale far more horrible.  It’s about a feminine myth that has kept women from reaching their full potential.   We start with Hysteria, the Greek word for muse.  Literal

My life is pretty hectic at the moment.  Besides caring for my 98 year-old mom, there’s my play to worry about and preparations for my move to a retirement center.  When I saw my calendar for the upcoming week, I threw up my hands.  “Oh no.  Not another lunch, coffee, movie!�

While scientists attempt to map the human mind in a well-funded program called The Brain Activity Map Project (BAM), theologians and philosophers wonder if that mapping will give us a greater understanding of consciousness and free will than we have now.  As writer and Pulitzer priz

We humans have curious minds and I use the word in two senses: 1) as minds that take an interest in the world around them, and 2) as minds being strange in themselves.  Hamlet observed, “What a piece of work is man,” (Hamlet II, ii) and  I couldn’t say it better.  The entire

After spending an August afternoon shopping with her granddaughter for back to school clothes, a friend sent me an email saying that all the child talked about was her determination not to be a chatterbox in the coming year.  A month has passed since that conversation and I’m wonde

In his new book, Super Intelligence, Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, issues a warning about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Huffington Post  One of the problems lies with language which can been dangerously ambiguous. Tell a robot its mission is to m

Elizabeth Lunbeck’s new book The Americanization of Narcissism, explores the fault line between healthy and unhealthy narcissism.  (Me, Myself, and ID,” by Laura Kipnis, Harper’s Magazine, pgs. 80)  In it she explores the question of narcissism’s origin.  Is it nurtured by

Several years ago, I read a medical expert’s analysis of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  He concluded that the book exhibited not genius but the workings of a diseased mind.  If the doctor’s theory had been  treated seriously, a number of  literary critics and scholars who claim to

One of my favorite cartoonists, Jules Feiffer, has turned 85 and recently published his first graphic novel, Kill My Mother.  Because the book departs from his usual satirical expression and ventures into tragicomedy, an interviewer asked how the cartoonist arrived at his plot.  Fei

Periodically, over the years, a group of former political colleagues and I have gathered for lunch to share the events in our lives and the latest political gossip.  The restaurant where we used to meet was known for serving healthy, organic foods but we didn’t go there for the men