It's a rare pleasure to have a fully satisfying theater experience, and worth celebrating when it happens. Last night, Ellie and I went to see Ed Harris in Wrecks in the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse--a short, 80-minute, one-person performance written and directed by Neil LaBute,...

I've been thinking about greatness. My eye was caught by a headline in Saturday's NY Times Arts section, "Their Goal: To Regain Oscar's Old Luster." And I wondered if that would ever be really possible again. Is it just me, or are even the movie stars smaller than they used...

I obviously did not want to read this book. It first arrived in the mail, as an advance review copy, several months ago, and I...

This might be a good time for those who have not already done so to consider Buddhism. I am no proselytizer of religion, but there is a great deal to be learned from the teachings.

If, as I do, you look around in dismay at the hierarchies that seem to...

I'm reading two books--both advance copies--which are providing some insight into our current situation. The first, The Compassionate Instinct, edited by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith, is subtitled "The Science of Human Goodness."

The collection of essays by various scientists includes not only a great deal...

The Novice: Why I Became a Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit, & What I Learned, by Stephen Schettini, Greenleaf Book Group Press

If "The Novice" were fiction, it would be called a Bildungsroman--a novel of education. It's not...

I'm rediscovering the pleasure of holding a nicely-made book in my hands. Most books these days, even the hardcover ones, have a mass-produced feel to them. No matter how well designed they are, how good the "look" of them, the paper feels toothless and the pages are hard to turn,...

In the context of the current health care debate, I note with pleasure that my friend Knute Keeling has written a splendid and timely book. It's called Family Fun and Fitness: Getting Healthy and Staying Healthy -- Together, and its sub-subtitle is Eat Your Best, Be Your Fittest: How...

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined this richly associative phrase nearly two centuries ago he was talking, of course, about literature. Specifically, he wanted to justify his love of fantasy, arguing that "human interest and a semblance of truth" would serve to seduce the reader into an imaginative compact with the...

Some good folks have only half-way understood my PO/PO initiative (see prior entry) to be a letter-writing campaign. That's only a part of it. (Do these senators read letters anyway, I wonder?) The more important part, as I envisioned it, was about community action, demonstration, solidarity... Remember "Solidarity"--the movement...

JOIN ME! You've been following the news, as I have. NOW WE MUST DO SOMETHING. Here's my personal intention and commitment. It's quick easy, clean.... YOU CAN DO IT, TOO!

It is now clear that we stand on the brink, ready to shred the last tatters of the great American experiment in democracy. We know from the polls that a huge majority favors serious health care reform, at least one poll suggesting as many as 85 percent. And yet a...

This past Monday was the 30th anniversary of Jimmy Carter's malaise speech. It was this speech in which he -- modestly, but unwisely, as it turned out -- itemized a long list of complaints about his presidency from Americans of all walks of life, who had been invited to...

It occurs to me that our culture doesn't do much to encourage us to respect discipline, much less practice it. We grow up believing it to be the enemy of creativity and an obstruction to our imagined freedoms; and while we grudgingly acknowledge its value -- for others, chiefly! --...

This is the sad--and sadly serious--question I'm asking myself today. Is it time to give up on a political system that is now so irremediably broken that it has become impervious to our needs and irrelevant to our lives? Do we just leave those we elected as our representatives to...

Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was frankly surprised by the response to the piece I cross-posted last week from my daily blog, The Buddha Diaries. It was called, if you remember, "When Do We All Grow Up?" and its subject was the kind of foot-stamping impatience with...