The Democratic Party is starting to wonder if Hillary Clinton is in it to win it, or doin it to ruin it.

Players and pundits are opining about motivations. Is she angling for a spot on the ticket in hopes of engineering a palace coup four years from now? Does...

Dear Senator Clinton:

When I heard that you have now spent about $12 million of your own money on what is looking increasingly like a mathematical impossibility, I had a thought.

Since you're paying for this anyway, and the odds of winning are about the same as W and Michael...

Mother's Day marks a time for some women to reflect on years past and what lies ahead once the kids are gone. After 30 years with children, Peggy Drexler is preparing to contemplate a loss that's ahead of her and how to embrace her empty nest.

Mother's Day was always...

The recent Harris Interactive study that quantified stressed-out Americans focused on immediate and personal causes - like jobs, household budgets and dwindling personal time. And those pressures are all very real.

But those issues are spikes in an ever-elevating baseline of stress that comes from issues that are beyond our...

The people of Pennsylvania have spoken and the show goes on. Not just the political campaign, but a marital drama unlike anything in American politics.

The interplay between husband-campaigner and wife-candidate is wonderfully and uniquely personal. And on levels I don't think have been fully absorbed by voters - curious...

I'm starting to feel inadequate. Across the decades since I have been eligible to vote, I have not received one single phone call asking me how I plan to vote.

So I did a mass mailing from my e-mail address file including friends, relatives, people I barely know and...

It's amazing to me how quickly the arguments about what is - and is not - an effective family defaults to big numbers when in reality, the effectiveness of families is measured in small moments.

It's as if citing percentages in the outcomes for kids of single...

Something has been nagging me about Chelsea Clinton's Lewinsky moment at Butler University. As we all know by now from the infinite news loop, a young man asked her if her mother's credibility had been damaged during the Monica Lewinsky scandal - as in dad was getting busy with interns...

It's been a very long eight years. I was reminded of that as I listened to Barack Obama's amazing speech on race in America.

Just as you eventually get used to the annoying buzz from a failing light fixture, we have become accustomed to the snarling...

Madeleine Albright once said, "Anybody who thinks the world would be a better place if run by women doesn't remember high school."

I think about that. I remember the power players in my own high school. And I think about Hillary Clinton and women voters.

Studies of...

A note showed up in my e-mail the other day. It was from somebody who - well, let's just say he is not a fan.

He pointed out the published results of a 20 year study at Sweden's Uppsala University that showed active and regular engagement with...

Like so much of our culture these days, game shows are getting mean.

I was watching Deal or No Deal the other night - fine, I'll try to get out more - and I started wondering whether I was watching a game show of a finely tuned act of public...

If television reflects the state of the sexes, men are in trouble.

I've watched two episodes now of ABC's Cashmere Mafia and I see a gaggle of males who are insecure, dependent, jealous and damaged. I caught a few episodes of Big Shots, and I see stooges with money -...

A friend told me that she asked her 13-year-old son what is the most important thing about being a boy. He said: "Taking care of others."

She asked how I would interpret that answer. (As a psychologist, I get that a lot.) And like any psychologist, I answered with a...

I'm going to miss my newspaper.

We've been together a long time. I care about it. I need it.

I'm one of the people the godfather of medium and message Marshall McLuhan was talking about when he said "People don't read newspapers, they slip into them like a...

Something called the Little Green Book showed up in my e-mail box the other day. It's a very creative viral marketing piece from Morgan Stanley that allows friends to pass on 50 things that any household can do to "make life greener and help tackle climate change."

Unfortunately, this well-done...

A friend of mine knocked on my door with some sad news. Her mother had died.

As I sat beside her on the couch, I felt her sadness like an embrace. It wasn't just the tears that imparted her pain. She seemed to deflate before my eyes, as if something...

Reading about Bill Clinton's testy "don't be accusatory with me" outburst at a recent campaign stop we're reminded again how deeply and wildly churn the uncharted marital waters of this election.

In untested, untried ways, spouses may win and lose votes, maybe even elections.

The Clintons are bookends, of...

It always seems like a leap of faith to invite a contractor into your home. They become members of the family -- free to wander through your life.

The Council of Better Business Bureaus reports that many of these contractual families become dysfunctional. Once again in 2006, home contractors were...

As we careen into full blown campaign season, gay marriage will likely move from a simmer to a boil. Declarations will be forced, answers will be parsed, fine lines will be tiptoed.

But as both sides of the cultural divide argue about the rights to a happy and legal union,...