Is reality TV finally living up to its name?

Most of what we are served up under that rubric is actually the farthest thing from reality. The exploits of Snooki, Jake the Bachelor, and all those Real Housewives hardly reflect life as most of America knows it and lives it.

Friday night on Real Time, Bill Maher, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and I discussed Move Your Money. Andrew liked the idea, but worried that it might cause a run on the too-big-to-fail banks. It won't. But it's clear from what's happening in Washington that we need a citizens' intervention...

Ethel Merman insisted "there's no business like show business." Well, I'm about to find out firsthand -- and I'd love you to join me at the start of the journey.

I am one of the executive producers of a new sitcom being developed for ABC. It's called Freshmen, and is...

This year's Academy Awards race is rife with political undercurrents and controversies: veterans' groups debating the accuracy of The Hurt Locker; conservatives complaining about Avatar's "mystical mélange of trite leftist themes"; a black critic saying of Precious "Not since The Birth of a Nation has a...

Update: The Consumer Financial Protection Agency continues to be a moving target for opponents of financial reform. The latest cave in compromise proposal being floated by Senate Banking chairman Chris Dodd now has the agency being housed within the Federal Reserve. An earlier "compromise" would have placed it...

Thursday's health care summit could have been dubbed Talking Points-Palooza. The GOP stayed ferociously on message, with speaker after speaker calling on the president to "start over" with a "clean sheet of paper" and take a "step-by-step approach." For their part, Democrats were committed to sending the message that, as...

I've always been fascinated by religion.

Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of my family's summer holidays on the island of Corfu. August 15 is when all of Greece pays homage to the Virgin Mary. I remember going to church on that day every year, and sitting quietly...

Between visits with my older daughter, who is in the middle of her sophomore year in college, accompanying my younger daughter on her college tours (she's starting in the fall), and regularly speaking at colleges all across the country, I've spent a lot of time on campuses lately.

And it's...

The White House served up a blast from the past this week with word that it was planning to rebrand the Iraq war -- something the Bushies did quite often. Come Sept. 1, it will be good-bye "Operation Iraqi Freedom," hello "Operation New Dawn"! This New Dawn will,...

Tiger Woods doesn't owe us a thing. Not an apology. Not an explanation. Not contrition. Nothing. Unless a public figure has broken the law, there is only one legitimate answer to the illegitimate probing of private lives: "It's none of your business." That said, purely on its own terms,

"You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps," said WWI-era British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. And you can't cross it in a series of little steps either.

On the first anniversary of the passage of the stimulus bill, the country's best economic research firms agree that the often-derided...

One of my favorite things about working in the news business is you never know where the day is going to take you. You wake up, and Evan Bayh is the farthest thing from your mind. Next thing you know, he makes a "last minute" decision and suddenly...

Two very different but ultimately very aligned versions of GOP mendacity were on display this week. At one end stands Newt Gingrich. A former college history professor, Gingrich is articulate and knowledgeable. But that didn't stop him from misrepresenting shoe-bomber Richard Reid's citizenship in an effort to paint President Obama...

One of the things I love about new media is how fluid it is. You never know where an interesting link might take you -- or where you may come across compelling content.

You could be reading a blog post on HuffPost that links to a story on The Atlantic...

Every TED conference opens with "The Elephant March" from Verdi's Aida and it never fails to have the same effect on me: an overwhelming feeling of new possibilities.

In his opening remarks, TED curator Chris Anderson met the zeitgeist head on, talking about his rage...

There was much to mock about this past weekend's Tea Party convention: the low turnout, Tom Tancredo's repulsive immigrant bashing, a conspiracy-drenched documentary claiming the financial crisis was deliberately engineered by radical 1960s ideologues bent on bringing down capitalism, and, of course, Sarah Palin's keynote lite.

But it would be...

The difference between Sarah Palin's reaction to Rahm Emanuel's ill-advised use of the word "retarded" (directed at liberals), and Rush Limbaugh's use of the word (directed at advocates for the mentally handicapped) speaks volumes. When it was reported that Emanuel used the word in a private meeting -- one time...

Today is the last official day of the HuffPost/Glamour Sleep Challenge 2010... and I ended things by not getting a wink of sleep last night.

No, this was not an act of defiance or the sleep equivalent of a last day of school blowout. It was a twist of fate...

For this month's HuffPost Book Club, I have chosen a big book -- both figuratively and literally. Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization clocks in at close to 700 pages and sets out to present nothing less than -- as Rifkin puts it -- "a new rendering of human history and...

Click here to read my previous post: "Glenn Beck Goes After Me, But Forgets His Show Is on Video and Lies About Things He 'Never, Never' Said"

So the Glenn Beck backpedal begins. Slowly. But surely.

After initially insisting that he'd never used the word "slaughtered"...