March Madness -- the annual NCAA Division One basketball tournament that determines a national champion -- begins this week, and life-long hoop-junkie that I am, I'll be watching as many games as I can. I'll fill out my bracket sheet, cheer for favorite teams, and mostly, like basketball fans across...

My novel, The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company, is set in the silent film era -- it begins in 1915, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where a a Jewish family that makes one and two reel (silent) films is making a new film on a frozen lake --...

My novel, The Other Side of the World, published this winter, contains a 100-page novel-within-the-novel set entirely in Singapore and Borneo. I've never been to Singapore and/or Borneo, or to any other place in Asia, and when people ask me about the book, and discover this is so, they seem...

A working writer to the most literal of ends, Ray Bradbury published a memoir about his early infatuation with science fiction, and his coming-of-age as a writer, in the June 4 science fiction issue of The New Yorker, one day before his passing from this world on June...

The pairing of two lead articles in a recent "Health" section of The New York Times -- one reporting that those of us with higher levels of HDL (so-called 'good' cholesterol) have "no significant decrease in risk of cardiovascular disease," and the other reporting that a popular antibiotic,...

By the time I wrote my first short story, at the age of 23, I had written five unpublished novels. What I couldn't figure out until then was how to complete a story in fewer than several hundred pages, for once I began making things up, one thing led to...

I mean, what honest woman doesn't have a bad hair day now and then, so that's all I was trying to say about my crossed hairs and keeping them in sight, but you know how they twist and turn your words against you along with your hair when you're in...

There was a miniature convention, featuring expert pickup artists, in New York . . . And over the last few years there has been a wave of books, CDs, DVDs and Web sites as well as a satellite radio show on the subject . . . The students paid $377...

Although Bosh wants to play with James, he wants to do it in Chicago, Miami or New Jersey. Sources say he has told the Raptors those are the teams he would like to go to in a sign-and-trade.

Bosh also could play with Dwayne Wade instead of James...

The whirlwind journey of David Sills from a 13-year-old middle school quarterback to the most talked about college recruit in the nation continued late Friday night...

"For the people that don't like kids getting recruited early, if it was their kid, what would they do? Would they hold back?"...

This past week, the New York Times heralded a new theory of brain development as providing "psychiatry with perhaps its grandest working theory since Freud." ("In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes Are in Competition," November 11, 2008) Even if the theory is flawed, the Times noted,...

This past week, the Bush administration reported a most welcome 30 percent drop in the number of chronically homeless people living in the nation's streets and shelters. According to a front page article in The New York Times, it attributed "much of the decline to the 'housing first' strategy that...

Ten years ago, while reading Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler, I came across a fact that was, to me, a revelation: Hitler's doctor, it seemed -- a man named Eduard Bloch -- was Jewish, and had lived in the Bronx all through World War II. So grateful was Hitler to his...

When a surveillance video surfaced on July 1 of Esmin Green collapsing and dying on the emergency room floor of Kings County Hospital's psychiatric ward while hospital workers stood idly by, city and hospital officials were outraged. They immediately fired people deemed responsible for the incident, and promised "significant...