In the last few weeks we saw three separate incidences where teenagers committed unfathomable acts of violence killing family and strangers with equal brutality. The motives are murky but if we look deeper we see a single thread links most incidences -- these kids are exposed to violence at home...

The images of devastation in the wake of Sandy are overwhelming, especially for a NYC gal who only could imagine such wreckage in some distant city with a history of floods or hurricanes. To see such devastation in NYC seemed inconceivable.

So as NYC still reels from the trauma...

Fashion Week has come to a close. For the last seven days, New York was abuzz as the celebration of chic sets the standard for global style. And as all of this pageantry took center stage, as a woman over 50, I feel like a kid whose nose is pressed...

There is so much noisy battling going on around the state of health care that sometimes one can easily overlook the quieter battles that go on every day in homes and doctors' offices around the country. And in these quieter battles, much of the heartbreak really resides. And just as...

Kids' books have been long cherished as a way for kids to learn about their world. In fact, the more complex their lives become, the more stories take on a new significance.

This is perhaps why it's not hard to spot a book that seems to be a "little"...

Alarm bells are ringing nationwide regarding the rising obesity rates among children. Public figures ranging from first lady Michelle Obama to officials across the country are recognizing the severity of the issue and are looking for tangible ways to help reverse the trend. It can seem like a losing battle...

Here's a grabber headline from Thestreet.com: "Tackle Trade Deficit to Create Jobs" which goes on to unambiguously to explain that: "Halving the nearly $600 billion annual trade deficit would create at least 5 million jobs..."

Then, on the same day there's this Huffington Post blog entitled: "

I am not sure when the history bug bit. I was not a youngster -- I think I was in college. But once bitten I was hooked. I loved it all. I loved the well written and thoroughly documented history books that had pages of glossaries and even more pages...

The research supporting the need for Arts within an educational system is uncontroversial. Study upon study confirms that kids exposed to the Arts within their school do better academically and emotionally. In fact, here is a handy list of "10 lessons the Arts teach" from the book, The Arts and...

I don't have any illusions as to the extent of the influence average consumers would have versus any D-list celebrity -- much less the one and only Britney. In the "real world", the glamour celebs live in a bubble of influence, privilege and media management that touches the life of...

I have always been proud to be a marketer, whether I was at a large advertisement agency or working from the client side. That is, until earlier this month, the exact date was December 11 -- a date that is now indelibly marked in my mind as the moment when...

No one who has watched TV over the last 40 years does not appreciate the iconic status of Mary Tyler Moore. In the 1960's Mary Tyler Moore played the loving yet "spunky" wife in The Dick Van Dyke show carving out a new equality between husband and wives. Then in...

From the telling of it, you would think that the notion of "crowdsourcing" was borne just a few years ago with the explosive growth of Wikipedia, the new age poster child for crowdsourcing. With that first groundswell crowdsourced success story, companies fell all over themselves to launch crowdsourcing projects from...

It's not an overstatement to say that our communities are vital in shaping a rich, meaningful life for everyone. We are social by nature and our communities, both the real and digital ones, reflect and amplify these tendencies.

While that was always true, we are seeing...

As a proxy for our friend, the generic "Judy Consumer," I had the rare chance to experience in person the Clinton Global Initiative (September 21 - 24) as "Judy Consumer" might. Never having been so close to so many...

The typical "Judy Consumer" out there would probably not have given a second thought to the notion of a personal brand, or if she did, she would relegate it to the domain of celebrities and the glitterati. Personal branding was certainly not anything she needed to worry about. Yet in...

If you didn't know better you might think the term "social engineering" was a benign reference to some "friendly engineers" - but you'd be wrong. Security experts have long worried about these type of online attacks because they use common and "cheap" marketing tactics to deceive making it harder to...

Our friend, the generic "Judy Consumer" is fighting mad at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Hospital infections -- a highly preventable hygiene issue -- goes largely under the radar because the CDC understates the scope and deadliness of this health concern.

Judy Consumer gets incensed when she...

It is a strange combination, I know; Carly Fiorini -- Senate candidate, Lady GaGa -- the pop culture icon and "Judy Consumer" (and we all know her). You may be tempted to quickly answer; "Oh they're all women." But if you stop at that simple answer, you'll miss something so...

I just saw this piece from Gizmodo (via BBC) entitled: "7 People Have Been Entrusted With the Keys to the Internet" and they go on to describe some fuzzy post apocalyptic Internet catastrophe where presumably the Internet is dead. This is when, (according to the article):

A minimum...