These are not the "Rodriguez Diaries" signifying the actual diaries of the recently resurrected and acclaimed singer Sixto Rodriguez. Rather the notion comes from my own motion in words, that began with my fascination with, and admiration of, the man, as well of an appreciation of his music.

When...

In a recent interview with Bette Midler, the New York Times Patrick Healy evoked her many qualms and apprehensions about a long awaited (by many) return to Broadway in the one woman show "I'll Eat you Last." One of the questions that almost certainly was rhetorical, is quoted as part...

I stood on the steps of New York's Town Hall with hundreds of other enthusiasts of the newly found but not new at all symbolic giant of Rodriguez, the resurrected singer song writer made famous in the Oscar winning documentary "Searching for Sugarman."

There was one gentleman on the step...

At a time when yoga seems not only to be booming but often seen as the answer to many internal and external ills, it seems time to help people understand the benefits and the mysteries of its cousin (let's say for now), Pilates. In speaking to a number of instructors,...

We all have our crushes, we all tend to put some people on a pedestal now and then. For me, Dr. Phil was distinctly off that list; he was anathema. I found him pompous and still feel angered by the arrogance of his telling parents on a CNN (with Anderson...

Have you had the experience of becoming aware of something that starts shouting its evidence in spades once you start to focus? Even something that has been dormant for a good deal of time? I think - I am actually pretty sure - that we all have had this experience.

The services of Medicare and Medicaid "do not make us a nation of takers, but enable us to be free... We will respond to the threat of climate change... some may deny the power of science... the path towards sustainable energy sources..." We do believe that lasting peace does "not...

I was sitting in a Manhattan movie theater waiting to see the newly Oscar-nominated Searching for Sugar Man, a documentary about the seeking and finding of an amazing musical phenomenon named Rodriguez. We were alone at the 11 a.m. performance, me and a self-described film "hobbyist" who was starting his...

Living in Nassau County in New York, in many of the towns, one finds either large minorities or hefty majorities of Jews. While in Fort Collins, a good hour north of Denver, the contrast is pretty dramatic, especially it seemed right around Christmas, which came shortly after we moved there.

I don't think I'm alone in feeling both privileged and depleted by what feels like a combination of access to information and the sense of being overwhelmed by so much going on in so many places that cry out for attention. Whether it is the call to sign petitions or...

To begin, this is not meant to be a judgment on the film per se, but rather a reflection on the story that has torn at many of our hearts through either the book or, for more of the people I know, through the show and now the movie. I...

Not to trivialize the brutal killings of the children and school personnel in Connecticut on December 14th. Not at all. I was shocked, saddened, worried. I am left needing to know about the psyche of the young man who used his mother's weapons to kill her and so many of...

I didn't go to see a preview of Bare off-Broadway last Sunday evening with any intention to write about it, or with the expectation of being especially moved. I was wrong on both accounts. A musical set in a Catholic boarding school, Bare is a coming-of-age set of stories that...

For some time now, I've been developing the idea and practice of what I've called "inventing a therapy." The point has been, to my mind, that much of psychotherapy hasn't been relevant to people's lives. It has often provided interpretations or expectations that have more to do with the "ceilings"...

Rock WILK is a white Jewish hip hop artist whose major external claim to diversity was that he was among the many who are adopted and feel perennially estranged, ill at ease in his skin, and in search for his birth mother who may have had some answers for him....

Granted this is a stretch, and it's also subjective. But just be patient, because the connections are here, at least in this case. Just having come back to the States to work closely with a family group in upstate New York before I head to Colorado, I was camped out...

It would have to be more than coincidental that the Brad Pitt Chanel commercial that apparently is making people sneer, comes on right before the 2003 film Beyond Borders starring Angelina Jolie, Clive Owens and lots of others -- a movie about African starvation and war and Cambodian relief and...

The trouble with happiness, as I see it, has to do with happiness as a goal whose urgency of achievement can overwhelm shades of feeling that are necessary for growth. We have heard much from neuroscience lately on the fact that we as human beings are wired for attachment. And...

I usually write something this time of year, when sadness meshes with nostalgia for a religion I don't practice anymore but with whose history and ethnicity and food and humor connected to Jewish identity, I very much identify with. As someone who is very sensitive to external cues, it's an...

Michelle Obama gave a great speech last night; that's what I heard and what I read. My husband and I, still in Italy, are devout Democrats -- me longer because he came to America when he was 29. So the last thing I want to do to Michelle or Barack...