You would think that half a century would be enough time for a company that brands itself as a nutritional innovator to keep up with the science, but in its new anti-obesity commercial, "Coming Together," Coke continues avoiding the real issues of obesity.

First, check out this Coke ad from...

Samuel Yirga: Guzo (Real World)
Ethiopian jazz pianist Samuel Yirga faced plenty of obstacles from stringent Western-focused teachers at Addis Ababa's Yared School of Music, but his love of his homeland's retro Ethio-jazz won out. His classical sensibilities fused with the native folk sound has made this...

In general, I avoid free literature thrown my way on subways and street corners. Recently passing by a stack of cheaply printed books while leaving Samosa House in Culver City, one caught my eye: Coming Back: The Science of Reincarnation. I pocketed a copy and walked through the door, interested...

New York City-based vocalist Morley has long employed various modalities of yoga technique and philosophy in her music and lifestyle -- as a hospice worker, for at-risk youth, in her role as a social activist, teacher and yoga instructor, and, of course, as one of the fiercest female...

It is incredible how a similar tale resonates throughout the world in cultures that have very little contact with one another. The story goes like this: young child wants to play music for their career; parents forbid it, claiming it's impractical; child somehow perseveres and ends up a master. One...

When we think of breast cancer, we assume one disease under this name affects all women equally. As the journal Nature pointed out last month, however, there are four major classes of breast cancer. This breakthrough is useful for doctors and researchers in creating different treatments that may...

There's nothing quite like spending hours rubbing vinegar and lemon juice over the clothing and camping gear you hope to remove Playa dust from. Yet on the long ride from Gerlach to Los Angeles, I felt kinship to the cars and RVs I passed plastered in white sand. Upon pulling...

I love me a good cover song. The ability to reinterpret the music of others is a longtime trend, one in which Western classical music was built upon; how could it not be, before the advent of recorded music? Indian classical perhaps summed it best with the concept of the...

The GLBL Yoga crowd-funding expedition, culminating with a hoped-for 15,000 yogis converging on Central Park in August, is on the receiving end of a lot of controversy. Chelsea Roff's insightful article kicked off a series of commentaries about why dropping nearly $700,000 on a one-day yoga...

'While I remember...' Nickodemus says, reaching into his backpack. It wasn't the first time I've randomly run into the Brooklyn-based producer/DJ on a San Francisco street, though neither of us live here. He pulls out a copy of Moon People (Wonderwheel), his late-night counterpart to his previous Sun...

When I began teaching yoga in 2004, what interested me most was music; more specifically, how music and postures played along together. Introduced to yoga through a dance class, music had become a necessary component for movement. While I learned to appreciate silence studying under some teachers, that path didn't...

The face looks familiar even if the angles appear different. Most photos of Ravi Shankar feature the man gazing down in fierce concentration, a musical sadhu performing intense tapas by plucking and stroking tightly wound strings. That the 91-year-old sitar player from India is a legend is already beyond mentioning....

After a chance meeting at a German airport, Israeli pop vocalist and pianist Idan Raichel would never have guessed that he'd record an album with the son of his musical idols, the late Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré. While Vieux Farka Touré initially thought of the thin, dreadlocked fan as...

Morley's sound has always been large. Even with just a simple guitar and her elegant voice, the Queens, NY native has consistently conjured music that can barely be contained in the room that attempts to house it. The reasons are numerous: smart production, intelligent songwriting and -- especially...

Mere moments into his breakthrough album, Black on Both Sides, Brooklyn rapper Mos Def likens people's perception of hip-hop to a "giant living in the hillsides." The assertion is that the music form has been removed from its fans' everyday experiences, which Def addresses: "If we smoked out, hip-hop's gonna...

Certain careers arc while others are rather like cliffs. Arcing usually results in a few lauded albums followed by a slow and painful descent, inevitably collapsing with matinee performances at local VFWs or, if lucky, a dedicated slot in the Vegas circuit. Cliff drops are predominantly reserved for artists who...

Magic happens on the dance floor. That's why I began dancing, why I began DJing, why I fell in love with electronic and tribal music the world over. Unsuspecting moments of active surrender that annihilate tremors of anxiety, depression or fear occur there -- dance floor as therapeutic tool and...

My fascination with Marseille-based band, Watcha Clan, began in April 2008, when a free pair of tickets from a local friend found me standing in the Parisian basement club, La Maroquinerie. Transglobal Underground offered a solid set of dub heavy, guitar ripping digitalism, yet they were truly openers...

With festival officials estimating 65,000 cramming into Scène Corniche El Hank to witness hip-hop artist 50 Cent's first Moroccan visit, I was not particularly shocked to later hear that that number was bumped to 100,000. 50 himself tweeted 200,000. I suppose from the vantage point of the stage, with the...

Watching John Martyn cue the drum machine on his epic folk journey, "Small Hours," you recognize that this man was way ahead of his time, implementing electronics in his genre the way Dylan ripped through electric guitar riffs.

I can't say I was ever a big John Martyn fan,...