For all the Maalox moments of this raucous roller-coaster of a campaign season, one thing can be said of the American people: We sure know how to make each other laugh.

While I certainly won't miss those daily emails that came streaming into my exploding in-box over the past...

And now for something completely different.

Click the image below to see a music video from award-winning composer-lyricist David Yazbek, from his new album, Evil Monkey Man. The song is called "Steps of Another Man's House," and the remarkable animation was done by filmmaker Onur Tukel.

Will watching the...

Their names were Denise, Carole, Cynthia and Addie Mae, and 45 years ago next month, on an overcast morning in Birmingham, Alabama, their lives were taken as they prepared for a Sunday school program. A dynamite bomb, planted by local thugs from...

Their names were Denise, Carole, Cynthia and Addie Mae, and 45 years ago next month, on an overcast morning in Birmingham, Alabama, their lives were taken as they prepared for a Sunday school program. A dynamite bomb, planted by local thugs from...

In discussing the 2008 election last week, Jon Stewart cracked jokes about orphans, Viagra and prehistoric monsters.

God, I love politics.

As someone who moonlights as a satirist, I'm often intrigued by the ever-merging traffic on the election news highway, as the campaign bus...

As the 2008 Olympics in Beijing grow closer, global protests continue to swell. Decrying China's policies on Darfur and Tibet, as well as its notorious oppression of human rights, activists worldwide are keeping up the pressure on the Games' sponsors, most recently holding rallies...

I've always liked Canada. Its health care system apparently works; its comedians are consistently a hoot; and, with the exception of that tired old bickering over Quebecois sovereignty that seems to erupt every few years, the gentle behemoth just upstairs from us always manages...

Amid the endless rattle and noisy clatter of the popular music industry, sometimes you run across a song that you just have to pass along. This is one of those moments.
Now playing on iTunes--and available for purchase on, among others,...

And now a word (and a few pictures) from an old pal, New York graphic artist Ken Chaya.

"I have always thought that politics and big wave surfing were a lot alike. Both employ the first three keys to human success and domination:...

In the first episode of the new season of The L Word, Showtime's lipstick lesbian soap opera, the character of Tasha has a crisis. Black, beautiful and enlisted in the Army National Guard, Tasha is accused of violating the Pentagon's "Don't Ask,...

Seven Christmases into the new millennium, and it's never been easier to catch the holiday spirit. Through Internet technology alone, we can swap season's greetings without licking a stamp; buy armloads of presents without leaving the house; and even log onto a flash-animated snow...

I almost lost it -- and in a seventh-grade classroom, no less.

It was "curriculum night" at my daughter's middle school, and all the parents were stuffed into small chairs, listening to a parade of teachers describe what was expected of our...

Phil Donahue is getting in the last word.

One of the first television personalities to speak out against America's hapless adventure in Iraq, Donahue was also among the war's earliest media casualties. He lost his MSNBC talk show back in 2003 when,...

OK -- so let's see if that whole power-to-the-people thing is alive and well (as usual) on HuffPo.

I just received a mass email from a friend that begins like this:

Hi Everyone --

It's starting to make me paranoid. My children never seem to hear my first three requests to pick up their shoes. The telephone sales reps never seem to grasp that I don't want a subscription to TV Guide. And the Chicken Delight...

And here I thought I was an OK dad. What a bummer to learn that I was making my kids dumb.

Researchers at the University of Washington and the Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute published a paper this month in the Journal of...

For the past two months, American television viewers have been on a stomach-turning hellride--strapped into the front car of a kind of media Magic Mountain, then whipped about with such head-snapping fury that it's often been difficult to tell where one story...

Everyone loves a good editorial cartoon--and why not? Even the wonkiest op-ed page addict eventually grows weary of all that purple-prose posturing and windy opinionating. And besides, with the constant stream of headache-inducing stories pouring in from the Middle East, the...

Forty-five years ago this spring, my brothers and I (ages 5, 6, 7 and 9) went to a Saturday afternoon showing of Pinocchio at the Uptown Theater in suburban Baltimore. Our mom had errands to run, so she sent us with...