The trailer's been on YouTube since December, 2007.

Disney ran a commercial for it during the Super Bowl

A bunch of previews followed, including one shown during the last game of the pro basketball finals.

And yet I knew nothing about WALL-E until it opened...

In the winter of 2008, when all was politics, my non-political friends kept sending me the video of Jill Bolte Taylor's 18-minute talk at the TED Conference. That audience swooned; two million online viewers and instant fame followed. Dr. Taylor was named to Time Magazine's list of the...

If you're going to only one conference a year, you might as well go to the best. For me, that's D: All Things Digital, masterminded by Wall Street Journal personal technology columnist Walt Mossberg and the scourge of Silicon Valley, Kara Swisher. They put on a great show,...

Self-help books are like diet books -- the people who mostly get helped are their authors and publishers.

But I hope that Steven Pressfield and his editors at Grand Central Books are drinking Petrus tonight, because The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner...

At a publishing party, I was chatting with a literary agent who's one of the titans of this troubled business.

"In the last year, can you name a new novel you couldn't put down?" I asked.

Long pause. He couldn't. Nor could I. My Amazon.com account has become a blur...

John McCain is very unhappy about the North Carolina commercial that connects Barack Obama with Rev Wright's "God bless America? God damn America" sermon. [See it here. ]

Indeed, he sent a letter to the North Carolina Republican Party leadership:

"This ad does not live up to the...

Video
The Last Lecture (short version)
The Last Lecture (full version)

One of the staples of "the college experience" at many schools is the "last lecture" -- a beloved professor sums up a lifetime of scholarship and teaching as if he/she were heading out the door...

The Cream concert at Brandeis University on March 23, 1968 was supposed to start at 8, but my friends and I took our time getting out to Waltham. Just as well. Cream's plane was late, and every half hour or so, we'd get an update. The night dragged on. Almost...

For most of this decade, the publishing and music industries have been in a race to see which can commit suicide first.

I would have bet on publishing -- is there really a single reader left for the annually-published novel about the family that gets together for a weekend...

Howard Schultz knows a thing or two about creativity. Historically, he invented the idea of mass-market coffee houses. As CEO, he was the original architect of Starbucks' glory. But Starbucks has hit the wall: limp earnings, weakening stock price, declining quality. So early in January, after a few years languishing...

"Endings seem to lie in wait," John O'Donohue wrote. His certainly did. He died in his sleep, January 3, 2008, on vacation near Avignon. He was just 53.

I knew John O'Donohue very slightly. I had read Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, the 1997 book that...

I ended this year's Head Butler Holiday Gift Guide with four charities I admire.

One was the Heifer Fund, which takes donations and buys farm animals for the rural poor around the world. And to get attention to the eccentricity of the holiday guide, I put "When was the...

Gratitude? In our tiny nuclear family, we pinch ourselves for our good fortune. But on a ritualized celebration like Thanksgiving? That's another story.

Our clans are small and scattered. Our five-year-old has zero interest in walking across the park to watch the Thanksgiving parade. More to the point, we're far...

It's weird for me to watch One Man Band, the James Taylor CD/DVD that's coming out next week. Oh, it's an attractive package, recorded in the summer in a small theater in the leafy Berkshire Mountains. As the title suggests, it's just James, a pianist (okay, he cheated) and...

Esther Perel looks like the New York couples therapist from Central Casting. Married for a zillion years, mother of two, trim as an arrow --- if you have to talk to a stranger about your sex life, she'll do just fine. And she's got pop credentials: Her recent book,

My wife and I stumbled out of a Manhattan theater in stunned silence. In San Diego, so did my 22 year-old stepson. So has everyone I've urged to see "Into the Wild".

The film is the story of Christopher McCandless, who graduated from college (Emory, '92), then left civilization...

Summer. Dusk. An ancient Cadillac convertible, top down, cruises on Long Island back roads.

On the radio, the Rolling Stones.

"The world's greatest rock band?" I ask.

The music mogul at the wheel doesn't have to ponder.

"Led Zep," he says.

And so it may be. Which would put...

Many people who are unhappy with their jobs or just eager to move up have used company time to work on their résumés. And they've probably gone on to photocopy those résumés on the office machine. And some of them have almost certainly left the original at the copier, where,...

They were handing out earplugs at the studio door.

"No thanks," I said. "I like it loud."

I got a look. And a pair of plugs. Two more steps, and I was in a 40' by 40' recording studio. There were only two rows of seats. The band would be...