We all have a list of books/movies/music that make us nuts.

Based on what I heard, this book surely looked to be on mine.

Consider: One Monday on a New York street, Maurice Mazyck, an 11-year-old African American panhandler, asks Laura Schroff, a 35-year-old advertising executive for...

How do you access the important moments in your life?

Not the moments the world sees.

I mean the great personal moments, the ones that matter most.

I'm certain I'm not alone when I say that music has been a direct pathway to...

Talk about "born to sing the blues."

She was named Jamesetta Hawkins. Her mother was 14 and completely uninterested in the parenting grind. She never knew who her father was (although, decades later, she was semi-reliably informed he was Minnesota Fats, the legendary pool hustler).

Her...

I'm often asked, "What's the best book you've read recently?"

Right now, the answer is: Canal House Cooking Volume No. 7: La Dolce Vita.

This causes confusion. A cookbook has no plot, no real writing. No thrills, no sex. No memorable takeaway.

Well, this...

The longtime girlfriend of John F. Kennedy, Jr. --- a woman he should have married, and didn't --- has written a book about their long friendship, glorious romance and fraught break-up.

On the plus side: Her memory is buttressed by decades of journals, and she makes a...

There's a big fight raging over a very small --- 120 words, 40 pages --- book for kids.

Some people say --- along with the New York Times, which named I Want My Hat Back one of the best Illustrated children's books of 2011 -- that this book is wickedly...

Congratulations.

For once, you are hearing about a monster talent before the Kool Kids.

That's because Break Mirrors is close to a secret. Blake Mills recorded his debut CD in a friend's studio in 2009, when he was 22. He released it --...

Cesaria Evora died over the weekend at her home on her native island of Sao Vicente.

Can't place it? It's one of the Cape Verde islands. And you may not be able to place them either. With reason: this archipelago sits 350 miles off the coast of Senegal.

It was...

Phil Spector is a killer and a sleaze, but he is also a tragedy.

When he was ten years old, his father connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of the family car.

Later, his mother chased him around the kitchen, brandishing a knife and shouting, "Your father killed...

The writer I used to be would be appalled by the writer I have become.

A butcher.

It started at Christmas.

I decided our 8-year-old daughter was ready for a version of A Christmas Carol not dumbed down by Disney.

And why not? Christmas Carol is only 28,000 words. Over...

A newsletter subscriber wrote to tell me that she was on the verge of unsubscribing from the HeadButler.com newsletter.

She said she came to my site for cultural recommendations. Instead, she was having to read to read the occasional paragraph or two about my wife, the child, me.

I suggested it was time for the 9.5-year-old to make her list for Santa.

She wiggled two fingers on each hand --- air quotes - and said, "Santa?"

"Whoa," I said. "You don't think there is a Santa?"

"You guys."

...

Dear Mr. President,

I know you're halfway around the world, doing very important things, but we've having some trouble here at home that your staff may not have told you about.

It's the police -- especially the police at the University of California, Davis.

In this video -- it's long,...

I got a Kindle for Father's Day.

"From everything I've read, the Nook is a better e-reader," I told my wife and daughter. "And from everything I've read, it's probably best to wait a few more months for the Kindle Fire."

So I sent the Kindle back to Amazon.

The year was 1967. Body bags were coming back from Vietnam at the rate of 1,000 or more a month. I had skipped my freshman year and finished my honors thesis in my third year, but I stuck around at Harvard for the simple reason that I didn't want to...

This is a poem by a recent Poet Laureate --- out of respect for the position, I won't identify the poet:

All night each reedy whinny
from a bird no bigger than a heart
flies out of a tall black pine
and, in a breath, is taken...

At some point in the mid-1970s, I decided that the comic book tales of "Tintin" should become a movie, and I launched inquiries into the rights. I never got to Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist who had been pumping out the adventures of Tintin for almost three decades. It wouldn't have...

There are exciting, original books, and then there is "Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout" --- just nominated for a National Book Award. It deserves to be. It's so astonishingly inventive that the cover is both a joke and a metaphor.

"Radioactive"...

I've known Sandy Hill for almost three decades, and every time I've heard she's gone off to climb some mountain or other, I've thought the same thing: She's nuts.

I would think that --- I was the kid who, in boarding school, couldn't climb the rope in the gym...

American mass media and American politicians must surely believe we are credulous children, because they love to tell us bedtime stories.

Remember Jessica Lynch, the soldier who was captured in the Iraq war -- and was then dramatically rescued? (The truth was less dramatic.)

Remember Pat Tillman, the...