I managed to catch a nasty chest cold circulating around town, found myself low on energy and sitting around for most of a week in no mood to work or even read, so I browsed Netflix and nostalgically began watching the first season of the... Continue
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Our modern lives are very speedy, filled with constant activity and continuous stimulation - deadlines, commitments, obligations, forms of entertainment, trips to the store, picking up the kids from school, getting to and from work, doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, running errands and so... Continue
I don’t watch too many television shows, but I’m hooked on Mad Men. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, where my businessman father lived the Mad Men life alongside the other post war executives. A episode this season featured scenes in... Continue
Dear Bonnie: With interest and penalties I believe I owe $90,000 of ‘06 and ‘08 federal taxes plus year to date ‘10 taxes. I have a couple illnesses. One is seriously debilitating and periodically impacts income and the other is terminal. I spoke to an... Continue
A few months ago Wikileaks released hundreds of thousands of government documents about the Iraq war, some of which reveal that not only did the U.S. military look the other way as Iraqis tortured and murdered Iraqis, but actually turned Iraqis over to the Iraqi... Continue
Earlier this month, Network for Good, an organization that has facilitated $437 million in online giving to over 60,000 U.S. nonprofits, released the results of a comprehensive study about online giving. One of the conclusions of the study is that people who give online are... Continue
Many of the most moving moments during the last weeks of my father’s life were experiences of hospice. In this age of modern medicine where every effort is used to successfully prolong life, hospice instead focuses patient comfort and dignity. Prolonging life, even when it... Continue
We study, analyze, organize, strategize, plan, anticipate, and calculate probabilities, but life constantly upends us. We enlist computers, algorithms, software programs, collected metrics, trend-spotting, forecast modeling and plain old intuition, yet fail to accurately predict much more than tomorrow’s weather. Despite insight, hindsight, or foresight... Continue
The human condition requires eventually losing everything, even our body; we don’t get to take it with us when we die anymore than we get to take our favorite sweater. Birth, aging, sickness and death comprise the totality of our physical experience - we all... Continue
Considering the immeasurable diversity of forms of life in this world - tube worms breathing methane at the mouth of 800 degree volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean, lichens digesting the minerals in rocks for survival, worms living inside glaciers, bacteria that grow... Continue