While the Obama Administration fends off bad news over its handling of the Benghazi tragedy, the IRS's enhanced scrutiny of conservative groups, and the Justice Department's snooping on the phone calls of AP reporters, the military continues to reel not only from a sexual-assault scandal but also from increasing rates...

The studio in the hills overlooks Laguna Beach, an art colony with its crescent-shaped cove and well-known summer arts festival. Christiana Lewis, an artist and humanitarian, leads me down a spiral staircase to her work area, where she has a blank canvas propped up on an easel. She wears torn...

To paraphrase the late Ronald Reagan, there they go again. Reagan, who used that line in a completely different context against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984, could not have imagined a time when another Democratic politician would join a list of bad actors in attributing his...

Shakespeare once famously said that the first thing we should do is kill all the lawyers. Perhaps, computer programmers and electrical engineers should be next on the list.

A recent article on The New York Times' website indicated that EdX, a nonprofit educational organization founded by...

The messianic rhetoric uttered by Barack Obama when he was first running for president has faded. We no longer hear references to now being the time that the oceans stopped rising. It is a good thing for all of us to recognize our limitations as homo sapiens.

Yet last week...

On the day after the Oscars, Julian St. John, a budding star in his own right, arrives at Jerry's Famous Deli in Studio City with his mother, Mia, a world-champion boxer. Julian wears a Playboy Jazz Festival T-shirt and a Yankee cap with the NY logo dyed pink....

"You talk really fast, man," said Julie Garfield, actress and daughter of the late Warner Brothers star John Garfield, who was known for his accelerated streetwise patter. "Who do you think you are, Martin Scorsese?"

Julie Garfield, who was calling from New York, and I were speaking in November 2012,...

Some years ago, after I wrote an op-ed on mental illness in the L.A. Times, I was contacted via email by a woman who told me that her husband had experienced delusions similar to the ones I had discussed in my article. Like me in the late...

My psychiatrist once told me that his own analyst had remarked that if we were held responsible for our thoughts, we would all be put in jail. Bob Dylan made a similar point years ago when he sang, "If my thought-dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in...

There have been numerous memoirs, a cottage industry's worth, on bipolar disorder (Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation comes to mind). And there have been numerous novels about Hollywood, going back to the days of Nathanael West and Budd Schulberg. While it is quite possible that there have been novels about bipolar...

Even the Dickensian sage, Mr. Bumble, may not have felt that the law is a complete ass. Sometimes, the asinine rigidity of the law and its practitioners can be overcome with a little creative thought.

That is why I was delighted that Vice President Biden echoed what I have...

In the Dorff-Nelson Chapel at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles, Frank Baron bent forward, his hands trembling a bit as he held onto the wooden barriers between pews. Had he been wearing a tallis, a blue and white shawl, one might have thought that he was davening in prayer....

Some have attributed it to Chekhov; others to Ibsen, whose play Hedda Gabler dramatizes the principle. Whoever deserves the credit, we should all know one of the axioms learned in storytelling 101: When there is a gun on the mantel in Act I, it will likely go off by the...

Of all the psychiatric diagnoses du jour, the most fashionable for children and teens has been attention deficit disorder (ADD) as well as its sibling, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A recent New York Times op-ed by Bronwen Hruska, titled "Raising the Ritalin Generation," revealed that, as...

Sometimes, it seems that there is a double standard, a bipolarity, if you will, concerning bipolar disorder. On the one hand, there is the bipolar disorder that according to the NIMH's Web site afflicts 2.6 % of adults in this country. A serious condition, it is nonetheless...

The spat, if it can be called that, over Maureen Dowd's most recent New York Times column, "Neocons Slither Back," amused me for a few reasons. First of all, I concur with James Fallows of the Atlantic that Maureen Dowd is not even remotely...

Four years ago, then-presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain both revealed that Robert Jordan, Hemingway's protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls, was one of their favorite characters from literature. That is a very safe choice for a politician, choosing a character who is heroic, selfless, willing to sacrifice...

Not long after the story broke that a gunman (who may or may not have had accomplices) had reportedly killed six people and wounded three others in a shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Don Lemon, CNN's weekend anchor, stated that the gunman was "disturbed" and that...

In one of the Democratic debates in the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama was asked why as an Illinois state legislator he voted Present so many times rather than Yes or No. He turned to John Edwards and said perhaps with a touch of condescension, "Understand, John, that I led,...

President Obama has said that he would rather be a good one-term president, than a mediocre two-term one. If he really means that then, in the wake of the massacre in Aurora, Colo. that has left at least 12 dead and 58 wounded, why doesn't President Obama issue an executive...