In April, President Obama announced the new BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative, which many hope (expect?) will find the sources of -- and solve -- the mysteries and distress of mental illness and addiction. It will not. It cannot.

Before addressing the BRAIN initiative, let's...

The Tsarnaev brothers who are accused of having set off bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, 26-year-old Tamerlan and 19-year-old Dzhokhar, have two images. (Tamerlan is deceased, leaving only Dzhokhar to be charged.) The chief image is, of course, that they are terrorists-murderers who allegedly killed three...

The ultimate paradox in media and public life is that when we most ardently seek information, we get the most bullshit. This anomaly is unavoidable: competitive non-stop media outlets must respond to our anxiety-fueled need to explain what often times can't be explained ultimately, and certainly not in the near...

The subterranean rancor most often referenced at the New York Times is between New York Jewish boys, one conservative and one highly liberal, who never bring their conflict out into the open. But the enmity is so clearly there, Atlantic Wire's John Hudson says that "David Brooks and...

News item on New York magazine's website: "The United Nations has a drinking problem, thinks Joseph Torsella, the U.S. ambassador for management and reform at the U.N., who on Monday got a promotion from Captain Buzzkill to admiral by publicly scolding his colleagues for boozing during budget sessions."

Writing as a student during the Vietnam War in his surprise bestseller, The Strawberry Statement, James Kunen noted that, while people have been sent to prison for opposing wars, no one is ever penalized for backing unnecessary wars, or for resisting abandoning a failed campaign.

This is a good week...

For the second time in less than a year, The New York Times Magazine has identified a major addictive trend that does not involve drugs. In this case, it is junk foods (the previous example was mindless games). A science writer friend of mine wasn't impressed:...

David Nasaw's biography of Joseph P. Kennedy, entitled The Patriarch, raises familiar memes about the patriarch of the Kennedy clan: how he prowled around despite his marriage to saintly Rose (most notably with silent screen star Gloria Swanson), how he was both an absent father and a beloved role model...

For several days this month, one of the most emailed articles in the New York Times was "Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart?" The article purports to explain why some children fold under the pressure of taking tests. It begins with the case of...

Several images float before me when I note Coca-Cola's efforts to "engage" in the health and obesity debate.

One is of Don Johnson (of Miami Vice fame), when he signed on to shill for Pepsi (he later shifted to Coke) saying how he would have been a lot...

Watching 12-12-12 concert organizer, Harvey Weinstein, talk on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" about the cause that brought musical royalty (from Paul McCartney to Bruce Springsteen to the Stones, et al.) together, I was struck by how the film mogul personified the disaster in an entity called "Sandy," attacking this...

May it please the Court:

My argument is addressed principally to Chief Justice Roberts (although, of course, you -- Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy -- can listen in).

I'm only going to cite one precedent -- Dred Scott. You know, the case where the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger...

Nobel-prize-winning New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman is impressed that the leaders of the Republican party have buried their heads in the sand in a remarkable number of cases (e.g., Mario Rubio, Bobby Jindal), and are able to acknowledge neither evolution nor global...

Among the misconceptions fostered by AA and the disease theory of addiction is the idea of "hitting bottom" -- that there is some objective state beneath which no human being will go. The same is true in our misconceptions about what will end our war on drugs. Opponents of the...

On Thursday, I went to the Park Slope YMCA early, 6 a.m., expecting it to be open after it had been closed two days. It wasn't. And thus began the Miracle on 14th St.

You see, I live in Brooklyn, close over the bridges from New York City, and my...

NBC's Brian Williams, among others, seemed to find the compliments and jokes Barack Obama and Mitt Romney threw at one another at the annual Al Smith Dinner in New York to represent something like a heart-warming laying down of their campaign cudgels. At the dinner, the good Cardinal...

Cognitive science is all about showing that people's thinking isn't rational -- that their explanations are either expressions of gut reactions or justifications for their beliefs and lives. As Jonathan Haidt wrote in the New York Times:

I developed an idea from Howard Margolis, the distinguished social scientist...

At first blush, this question might seem a no-brainer. Elected to Congress in 1994 from the Florida panhandle as one of Newt's "Contract With America" foot soldiers, the host of MSNBC's Morning Joe labels himself a conservative who was dissatisfied with George W. Bush for not being conservative enough! Co-host...

Following are five key ways in which addiction experts demonstrate a detachment from the most self-evident truths about addiction, and what causes their addiction delusions.

I. Most People Get Over Addiction. I have driven home the points revealed by the NIAAA's NESARC research -- the largest study of...

From the most ardent Obama supporters on down:

1. He won! (See Al Sharpton): The president successfully employed a rope-a-dope strategy, drawing Romney into making a host of unsustainable assertions re taxes, health care, Medicare, Wall Street regulation, et al. Now the Democrats can feed Romney's statements into...