From an Alternet essay by literary and cultural critical Harold Bloom: "The horror of what is taking place in Iraq exceeds my worst fears five or six years ago (after Bush came to power). I am horrified at the disastrous mistake involved. Imagine the complete madness in trying to occupy ...

Having just a few days ago posted an encomium to Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and current courageous political activist, I was struck by an interesting contrast between his story and the late Bobby Fischer's. One of the main points Kasparov kept mentioning in the talk I heard ...

"People aged 1 through 100 banging on a drum.":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUHLa1qSy24Fun and oddly compelling. The Daily CoyoteYoung woman lives in a cabin in the Wyoming countryside, finds a 10-day-old orphaned coyote, names it Charlie, raises it, and takes amazing photos and writes compelling commentary as it grows up. I'm not a huge ...

I had the good fortune to encounter four amazing activists last year. The first was Doris Haddock, a.k.a. GrannyD , an incredible woman who walked across the United States at the age of 89 to advocate for the elimination of unregulated "soft" money in campaigns. She then returned home to ...

The New York Times has a pretty good article on life coaches and what they do. I particularly like the fact that the coach they feature most prominently comes, as I do, from a business background: many coaches come from a social work or psychotherapy background, and while those skills ...

Great long - but extremely lucid - article on morality by psychologist Steven Pinker in Sunday's New York Times. I love the beginning: "Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least ...

From Boing-Boing "Oscar, there are so many things I would like to tell you which have happened over these past twenty years. Ever since you were abducted, on that February 23rd 1984, my heart has remained completely void. You know I considered you not just my son, but also my ...

Artist Joel Harris has posted a selection of his artworks spanning his entire life starting with crayon masterpieces from age 5, and proceeding through his Mad Magazine phase, cartooning phase, Marine Corps phase, European travel phase, and culminating with a radically new style of art that he evolved after he: ...