Laura Paull

About halfway through their companionable onstage conversation at the Castro Theater in San Francisco Thursday night, Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, mixed a cocktail for Rachel Maddow.

It was a cognac-based drink, "based on a cocktail called Scorch the Earth, which I thought was appropriate," Handler said, "and you may...

You read the news. Or watch, or listen to it. Maybe you sometimes think: I could do that!

In late February, Howard Fineman announced our Cover the Conventions Contest, inviting the public to make a pitch to us about why they should be chosen to...

The past, the past, le passé. Past perfect, past imperfect, passé composé...The past weighs heavy on 87-year-old Claude Lanzmann, director of the incomparable Shoah, a nine-and-a-half-hour film about the Holocaust.

So much history, both worldly and personal, in the can. So many people who have died: friends, family, lovers,...

Within the creative writing program at Vassar College many years ago, we all recognized the major talent in our class -- and it was only in part because she was the great niece of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer and the granddaughter of the other Polish-Jewish...

To be honest, I wanted her because she was smart.

The 2011 Berkeley graduate was noted in a university press release as the recipient of the prestigious University of California Library Prize for Undergraduate Research. Her 50-page thesis paper, "They Rule the Valley: The Story of How Large Central Valley...

They're back: Estrogen supplements and hormone replacement therapies that women rejected en masse a decade ago when a major study reported significant health risks among subjects given estrogen, are returning to the arsenals of health professionals.

And the attitude shift is, to some extent, gender neutral. Testosterone replacement is also...

Three women shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize awarded this weekend for "their non-violent struggles for women's safety and for women's rights to participate in peace-building work."

Among them was Tawakkol Karman, a 32 year old Yemeni mother and founder of the women's advocacy group, Women Journalists without Chains. The...

He may be more Bernstein than Springsteen, but Maestro David Lockington was born to run.

In his 40s, the cellist, composer and classical music conductor decided he wanted to complete a Triathlon Sprint by the time he was 50. But there were a few hurdles. He didn't cross the finish...

On the first day of the first annual conference on "The Poetics of Aging" in San Francisco last week, I was chosen from a small audience to receive the touch of 97-year old Marion Rosen, a German-born Holocaust survivor who developed the Rosen Method of emotional release through...

Last year, like many Americans affected by the recession, I began to anticipate the worst.

As the shrinking economy impacted the state education system, I was laid off from a tenured professor position. I put my credit card in the freezer. Gave up the idea that I would ever have...

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Before the American Revolution, journalism, if you could call it that, was an elite practice heavily censored by the colonial government. So when Thomas Paine...

Last winter when I was teaching media courses at a community college, I had the good luck to have scheduled a class on the cinema of the Middle East. I had wanted to create such a class for some time, and decided that the winter of 2011 was the semester...

How two citizen journalists uncovered a bizarre GOP fundraiser.

Arizona resident Dawn Teo was perusing her daily emails when an item on a standard Pima County Republican Party newsletter caught her eye. The Pima County Republican Party was selling raffle tickets for a Get Out the Vote fundraiser. The...

ISLETON, Calif. -- Judging by the brass plaque prominently posted outside the bar of the Del Rio Hotel and Casino in this tiny Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta city, the people of Isleton do not easily forget when they've been bullied.

No sooner had a hotel with a casino opened in...