"You're such a complicated person."

"This is a complex deal."

"It's complicated. You wouldn't understand."

In our speed-and-greed anti-culture, the words complex and complicated, and the nuances and layers the words evoke, have reached a kind of cult status. Being complicated means you have depth, smarts, education, your fingers in...

The link between the warrior and the scholar is an old one, and in the cultures as diverse as ancient Greece and China, one as august as any. These days soldiers who become statesmen, or scholars who teach at military colleges exemplify the tradition best. While those folks are often...

Not quite as popular as vampires, but not far behind, zombies seems to be all the rage recently, from I Am Legend and Zombieland on the silver screen to the plethora of print offerings, including a "survival guide" on Amazon. What's missing, however, is talk of the fact that without...

Graeme Maxton is an economist, and a host of CNBC's Squawk Box. As evidenced by his new book, The End of Progress, How Modern Economics Has Failed Us, he's also a thinker of the sort of astonishing depth and breadth, and one to speak the sort of tough truths that...

One worrisome development among many in the consumptive frenzy of our so-called culture is that our innate desire to improve ourselves has been transformed into to a desire to improve our material position. Are there those among us who lack the basics of food and shelter? Sadly, yes. Those who...

John Donohue, a devotee of the Japanese martial arts, has a knack for rendering those arts -- and the culture that underpins them -- in a gritty way that makes the arts palpable to a Western audience while meshing with the demands of a modern American crime novel. In his...

A strong and clear way out of the problems that surround us these days is to be found in Deep Ecology, a scientific/spiritual/holistic term coined by Norwegian activist and philosopher, Arne Naess to express the global interconnectedness of all living things. Building on thousands of years of spiritual traditions and...

Spiders sling webs between stalks and catch flies, termites create voluminous clay mounds, anemones grow on reefs, tortoises dig burrows in which to sleep away the winter, bacteria explode in a drop of dew, and humans make villages, cities and towns. Obeying the dictates of evolution, all animals probe opportunities...

The ludicrous circus called the debt crisis reveals very interesting things not only about our political tendencies, our economic system, and the way our mainstream media enjoys holding a rat in its jaws and shaking it until it becomes a rhino, but also the precepts upon which we have been...

The prehistoric way of life is much in the news these days, what with new studies showing that pre-agricultural people lived long, healthy lives, and with the resultant spate of diet books urging us to return to tribal options. Thinking about how far we've come and the strange direction human...

China has emerged as the world's largest market for smuggled endangered animal species. Just as some of our own environmental transgressions are born of the Western notion of man's hegemony over the natural world, China's destruction of its natural heritage is rooted in social and cultural mores that include the...

In 1980, I was traveling in Kenya's Aberdare mountain range with my father, Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld -- renowned cardiologist and host of Fox News Sunday's "Housecall" -- when a runner burst into camp, having run 26 miles to deliver an urgent medical message. Upon receiving my father's reply, he took...

If you've traveled to China, you've likely encountered senior citizens flapping their arms early in the morning in public parks, or perhaps squatting, walking, singing or dancing in groups, twisting waists and wiggling hips and watching their own hands while performing repetitive movements. Most likely, these folks were engaging in...

At the very same time that most people were watching the Super Bowl Sunday night, I was preparing a morning feast for my turtles, thawing some frozen rats for my pet snakes and giving my Chinese Crested dogs a good long walk before settling in to read to my young...

Walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it has to be a duck, right? In a word, no. At least not in the case of Russell Bishop's new offering Workarounds That Work -- How to Conquer Anything that Stands in Your Way at Work. The title, subtitle and...

Have you just come back from shopping last minute sales? Have you been surfing for deals on items for holiday gifts? Are you looking at a house that needs clearing out from all the stuff you bought or received? Are you waking up at night wondering how you're going to...

Delightfully, deliciously, but perhaps not surprisingly, my recent Twitter and Facebook posts about putting down your smartphone and picking up a fountain pen instead coincided with Facebook's announcement of their new mail program, Fmail. Facebook's chess move is primarily aimed at increasing their revenue share by garnering more eyeballs (you'll...

When learning a new composition, beginning violin, guitar, and piano students focus on which fingers go where and in what order. Later, once the basic techniques are mastered, the teacher introduces the concept of making the notes sound like music by playing them to a certain tempo or time. In...

Hawaiians refer to it as mana, the Greeks called it pneuma, the Japanese call it ki, yogis know it as prana, devout Christians might think of it as the Holy Ghost, martial artists know it is energy, and my 10-year-old son insists it the ineffable force that lends atoms awareness...

Australian martial artist Gad Levy-Golan's self-help offering The Key To Qi is a lively interpretation of ancient Chinese techniques and wisdom, expressed by a practitioner who clearly enjoys sharing what he has learned with his local students and with a broader audience.

The eponymous "qi" is one of the most...