I am fascinated by playgrounds as mirrors of our society. And, lately, I have jumped back into playgrounds with both feet as several times a week I accompany my 20-month-old grandson Cassius (Cash for short) to one or another playground in Queens.

It has been hard earned. My son...

The media first fell pray to the hysteria of the six-year-old boy lost in the sky. Now it is clamoring for the punishment of Falcon Heene's reality-show-crazed father.

The only problem is, as Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden noted, there doesn't seem to be a sufficiently severe crime to...

Americans are looking for a bail-out from reality - some actions the President and Congress can take to restore the United States to its former economic glory, so we can all go on living the high life.

But opinion leaders are peering into the future and making different sorts of...

Like the stages people who experience grief due to a personal tragedy pass through, people concerned about modifying American drug policies have dialed through these five stages since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States:

1. Unbounded enthusiasm. Drug reform advocates, along with other progressives, were wild with...

In a recent post noting Barack Obama's limitations as a comedian, I cited his well-known roast of Rahm Emanuel, which took place at a fund-raiser for Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy, organized by Susan Axelrod.

I spoke about Ms. Axelrod and her cause in my post,...

You've seen clips of President Obama speaking at those Washington Press dinners, doing shtik. When he comes to a good joke, he suppresses a chortle, and then burps the punch line out, as pleased with himself as a third-grader who's just spelled "Mississippi." Obama's highly touted roast of Rahm...

A mind-boggling You Tube video describes how quickly the world is changing, how disorienting it is for even young people, how overwhelming are the intellectual demands made on us for processing new information, how China and India are surging ahead of the U.S., and -- while we're at it...

It began with the February C-Span poll of historians ranking Lyndon Johnson number eleven among American Presidents (although he was still behind his predecessor, John Kennedy, who was #6). Then, in April, a Times opinion piece recommended that Barack Obama follow the LBJ model for passing legislation. In that...

Many parents were shocked and chagrined to see the extent to which young people in the new Harry Potter movie casually consume alcohol, both in the presence of adults and together without adult supervision. True, no one behaved outrageously (although an inebriated Hagrid -- a good guy -- does pass...

The concept of addiction is thrown around loosely nowadays. But when people seek more and more of something that is not benefiting -- and in fact is harming -- them, that can reasonably be called addiction.

Americans are addicted to health care. They demand more and more of it, at...

For the first time in memory, Bill O'Reilly, arch Fox conservative, and Chris Matthews, arch MSNBC liberal, reacted the same to an event -- both found that Barack Obama failed entirely to explain his plans for health care reform in his televised press conference.

And virtually all commentators noted the...

The arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. the other day reminded me of the time a few years back when I was arrested and taken to the police station. Unlike Professor Gates, I was charged, had a trial, and was convicted.

Of course, I'm a white man, so racism...

This was the week that was for Barack Obama's efforts at health care reform (although many more will follow). The following five developments made clear that America is not prepared for what it must do, although the outlines of what this is are emerging.

(1) Liberal Americans ask the question,...

In family courts around the United States, children are taken from parents addicted to drugs. I observed this first hand in New Jersey, where I defended such parents.

The people I defended were indigent, and thus came under the scrutiny of the Department of Children and Family Services. (An alternative...

When Americans and their representatives speak of a better health care system, they mean more coverage for more people. When health economists speak of reform, they mean cutting spiraling costs by allotting care rationally, according to which care will do the most good for whom.

When Barack Obama speaks,...

Obama critics (e.g., Gingrich, O'Reilly, Hannity, Rove) call his oversea forays "apology tours." For these men, and others, to concede errors is the height of national and personal weakness.

As a psychologist in the addiction field, I developed a communications curriculum. Addicts frequently are mired in, along with their drug...

Susan Boyle's breakdown in the aftermath of her second place finish in "Britain's Got Talent" finals Saturday night illustrates two perplexing areas of human behavior: depression and procrastination. Why do people get stuck in unhappy life spaces?

The Susan Boyle story - like all such narratives - is irresistible. Unemployed,...

Oprah Winfrey seemingly confronted critical issues in her interview with Elizabeth Edwards about Edwards' book, Resilience. The book and the interview focused on presidential hopeful John Edwards' infidelity. Yet the questions Winfrey asked Elizabeth left all kinds of wiggle room -- factually, morally, emotionally. This was even truer when she...

When Iowa's Supreme Court voted unanimously that a state law banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, while New York's highest court had previously upheld a ban of gay marriage and California voters passed an initiative making gay marital unions illegal, Times editorial and op-ed writers were unhinged.

This turnabout so overwhelmed...

The advent of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen has placed at the forefront of modern American cinema Jewish male-gentile female (Shiksa) relationships - although this angle is often not explicitly (or is only tangentially) acknowledged in their films (as in Knocked Up, for example).

In the current Greg Mottola...