In 1972, large numbers of combat troops began returning to the states from Vietnam, many of whom were dependent on heroin. Alarmed at the prospect of flooding a nation in the grip of a crime wave with lifelong addicts, President Nixon hired Lee Robbins, a leading light in psychiatric epidemiology,...

Medical News Today recently ran a headline stating "ADHD Is A Genetic Neurodevelopmental Disorder, Scientists Reveal." They drew this headline from a recent study published in The Lancet, which analyzed the DNA of 366 children diagnosed with ADHD against a much larger control group. The study in The Lancet concluded...

When I set about becoming a writer in my twenties, I felt I needed to understand the nuts and bolts of language. I compiled lists of words and learned their etymologies. I broke down the sentence structure of books I admired in the hope of discovering a particle physics behind...

• In 2000, The American Academy of Pediatrics stated that ADHD is an epidemic.
• 8% of school-aged children were reported to have an ADHD diagnosis by their parent in 2003.
• Diagnosis of ADHD increased an average of 3% per year from 1997 to 2006.
• The production of stimulant medications Adderall...

I had been working for the last few years as a therapist at BHS Hollywood Family Recovery, treating "dual-diagnosis" clients in an outpatient drug program. BHS had been in trouble since the economy tanked in August, with County contracts gradually drying up during the course of the year.

After several...

Last week, The New Yorker ran an article on Google's ambition to put every book ever published onto an online, searcheable database, in other words, to create a complete, infinitely expandable library. The article focused on copyright challenges to this so-called "universal digital library" and on the possibility that a...

Yesterday my older son complained about his anthropology professor's Power Point lectures and the awfulness of being hammered by bullet-points at 10 in the morning. He quoted a vengeful line he put in his most recent paper: "Scientists and apes make perfect companions because of their similar linguistic and artistic...

Shortly after 9-11, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, whose name sounds like it belongs in an Ian Fleming novel, declared an "end to the age of irony." A few weeks later, Time magazine turned the phrase into a battle cry. Then NPR (which is the opposite of Vanity...

A few days after putting up my post "Starbucks and the White Whale" -- a reflection on Starbucks' ambition to become a cultural taste-maker -- I received an email from Daniel Gross, a Starbucks union-organizer in New York, pointing out some facts I had got wrong. I had said...

Last week, Bush joined other notable members of the GOP, such as John McCain, in bashing Kerry over a botched joke that inadvertently linked intellectual laziness and lack of education to getting stuck in Iraq. Kerry had meant to lambaste Bush, but his slip struck fertile soil. Many soldiers do...

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran an article chronicling Starbucks' strategy of positioning itself as a purveyor of high-end culture. The company has already enjoyed great success promoting compilation CDs, original albums, such as Ray Charles' "Genius Loves Company," as well as the movie "Akeelah and the Bee."...

It is a sign of the times that writing this post makes me nervous about my future. Could it come back to haunt me when Bush turns Utah into a Gulag? Of course, I don't really believe this will happen, but an irrational part of me worries that it might,...

According to polls conducted by Democracy Corps, a strategy group run by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, Americans view dependence on foreign oil as the number one national security priority. Given the current news obsession with Foley, this is both welcome and surprising. The current wisdom on both sides...

According to the New York Times, the prosecutor's office in Los Angeles is considering a criminal case against Cardinal Mahoney, who heads the country's largest Roman Catholic Archdiocese, for moving "pedophile priests from parish to parish in the face of accusations."

Rep. Dennis Hastert has spoken at faith-based...

A few years ago, The Onion ran a headline, "Drugs Win Drug War." The ridiculousness of the headline pointed up the meaninglessness of declaring war on a product. It also told a twisted truth. If it were possible to wage war on a product, this particular product would be winning.

This weekend, as my older son and I returned from a movie, we happened to pass The Container Store, which stretched across half a block of prime real-estate in Old Town, Pasadena. How did the owners manage to fill two floors with containers? Do people really shop for containers? We...

On the way home from school, my son asked me, "How much do you think it costs per month to lease a Hummer?" I guessed around $500, but my son said no, around $200, because no one wants a Hummer anymore.

When my son tells me something related to the...

Like most Americans, I learned about the fall of Twin Towers on TV. My wife called me into the bedroom, and I sat before CNN for the next five hours watching endless repetitions of video sequences that had become instant icons: the planes smashing into the towers, the ash...

I don't know about you, but I don't need to know another way for the world to end. When I was ten, I learned that in about five billion years the sun will grow big enough to vaporize our oceans and melt our mountains. A nuclear spat between the USA...

The other day, I took a hike with my 11-year-old son in Eaton Canyon, a desert trail at the end of Pasadena. Maybe it was a flavor of Armageddon in the 100 degree heat, or a hint of Iraq in the earthquake-shattered rubble along the base of the San Gabriel...