My brother has always been really smart and aware. So smart that his buddies in the Marine Corps called him "The Professor" because he could spout ready facts about anything. He joined the Marines at 18 for the adventure promised in the...

On Friday, I attended the Transmedia Hollywood 4 Conference at UCLA. Well, I attended half of it, thanks to social media. My friend saw my nametag at the registration, and she Facebook messaged me to ask where I was sitting. At that point I was in bed looking...

Reading the LA Times obituaries recently, I came across the words dedicated to Elwin Wilson 1936-2013, an "Ex-Klan supporter who apologized in '09 for years of violent racism." Wilson first made public his racist past in the Herald Newspaper of Rockville, South Carolina, shortly after the inauguration of...

Bloomberg Businessweek's article about the return of aggressive mortgage lending products is illustrated on the cover of the magazine with a cartoon that is evidence of the return of something else: overt public racism. The cartoon depicts an African-American caricature with large eyes, full lips, and an exaggerated expression of...

I grew up on Huell Howser, following him from Nashville, where I watched him on the local news, to Los Angeles where he opened a whole new world for me with his reports on California's treasures. Once I met him in Lucy's El Adobe, a Hollywood eatery with the kind...

My teenage daughter, home from school for Thanksgiving break, booked reservations for us at SoulCycle Brentwood (Los Angeles) to celebrate her first day of vacation.

"Mom, everyone loves SoulCycle! It will be so much fun!"

I knew about SoulCycle thanks to extensive promotion rivaling that of Kardashian clan....

In a world threatened by overpopulation and overuse of resources by the few, it is both inhumane and irresponsible to claim that every fertilized egg must reach delivery -- and yet that's where society's moral obligation for the protection of life ends. We must reclaim the terms "Pro-Life" and "Right...

"I highly approve of Romney's decision to be kind and gentle to the retard." Ann Coulter referring to President Barack Obama in a tweet during the final presidential debates October 22, 2012.

Like the "N word" or "fag," the word "retard" has joined the class of words disfavored...

America has a problem with obesity. Not just in our population, but in our finances. We bit off more than we could chew over the last decade and now we have a big fat deficit. How did we get here from the Clinton era's healthy $236 billion surplus...

Commentators who declare the Occupy movement a failure underestimate the value of protest in a democracy and fail to acknowledge how the Occupy movement has already influenced public and political discourse.

The Occupy movement is following the same trajectory from the streets toward public policy that was traveled by...

My Rabbi, Steven Carr Reuben, tells great stories, some factual, some allegorical, some simply to get a laugh. On this Jewish New Year, Rosh Hosanna, Rabbi Reuben started his sermon with a joke: A man walks into a movie theater and sits behind another man with a dog....

We've come a long way L.A. since 2006, when pioneering river enthusiasts were forced out of the water with their canoes by helicopter cops who warned it was against the law to recreate in the L.A. River.

In the last days of the 2012 legislative session, Governor...

The largest school district in California and the second largest in the nation, LAUSD, delivered a memorable civics lesson to the children of Thomas Starr King Middle School by granting the students' public request for a ban on food trays made of polystyrene (commonly referred to by the DOW Chemical...

I went to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as a part of the NRDC Delegation to The Rio + 20 Earth Summit to give a talk about plastic pollution at the invitation of Voices of African Mothers. Before I left Los Angeles, my friend Lucy Walker, Director of the...

When did everything become Plastic?

When I was a kid, we collected shells on the beach, not plastic trash. There wasn't enough disposable plastic in those days for plastics to collect on the beaches. Plastic bags came into heavy use in American grocery stores when I was in high school...

The Earth Summit, taking place this June 20-22 in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, presents a milestone in the environmental policy arena. Marking the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit also held in Rio, the international gathering of more than 150...

What would you do, personally, to defend life on the planet we call home? Would you dedicate your life to the future of life on earth? Would you risk your own life for the lives of others? Few people make these great sacrifices. We call them heroes. Maybe you are...

While the world waits to see if the leader of the free world, President Barak Obama, will attend the most important international environmental summit in decades -- The Rio Earth Summit -- another great orator is already confirmed to address global leaders about the future of life on our planet....

Robin Gibb has died of cancer at 62. According to the New York Times,

Mr. Gibb was the second Bee Gee and third Gibb brother to die. His fraternal twin and fellow Bee Gee, Maurice Gibb, died of complications of a twisted intestine in 2003 at 53. The...

For most Americans, most of the time, electricity is a given. We rely on electricity to power our lives at work, at school and at home. We rely on it so much, it comes as quite a shock when we are deprived of it. Lights go out in a storm?...