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Dear New Members of the 112th Congress,
I write to congratulate you on your election, to thank you for shouldering this responsibility at a difficult time for our nation, and to ask you to consider supporting some critical legislative priorities related to higher education.
I won’t bore you with the usual exhortation about how higher education is a jewel in America’s crown. I’m afraid that lately we have been on the national radar screen in negative ways: runaway tuition, a greater emphasis on research than on undergraduate teaching, and lack of response to the needs of the greater society. Like all caricatures, these oversimplifications contain some

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It is already on its way to becoming history. Tucson follows in a series that includes Columbine, Oklahoma, and Virginia Tech — not to forget the continuous streams of smaller aggressions to keep the genus going. Wanton acts of terror, to the point of shocking deliberate murders that seem inexplicable to normal thinking.
And the perpetual question: is man good or evil?
Columnists and many others ask: Could this one have been seen in advance? Could anything have been done to prevent it?
Our President is a “cool” one. Not cold, but with his emotions controlled in

The following words of hope are taken from a reader of this column. I was given permission to post this writing, but he prefers to remain anonymous:
“I am a sixty-four year old male, married with two adult children. In 2008 I was on a three-week teaching assignment in Vietnam and Singapore. I was not feeling well and thought it was due to long hours of

Officially, the Obama administration greeted the “Jasmine” revolution in Tunisia with open arms, calling for free and fair elections as the U.S. scrambled to get aboard the democratic bandwagon.
Celebration is restrained, however, in Washington. Instead, there’s serious concern about who will take the place of the corrupt, 74-year-old Tunisian dictator, who, until the end, was considered an important American ally in the War on

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Paul Krugman should be praised for his January 14, 2011 New York Times column “A Tale of Two Moralities” in which he seeks common ground and ground rules and for non-violent, respectful political debates. But Krugman is pessimistic that calls for greater civility in political discourse will be met with success because, in his view, there are two sides to the debate that do not share a common morality.
What he fails to understand is that added together these two sides amount to a small fraction of the electorate, and perhaps a somewhat larger share of elected leaders and commentators. It is true that some number (8 percent in the December NBC News Wall Street Journal Poll) of the public view themselves as “very liberal” and a slightly larger number (15%) view themselves as “very conservative.” These sides imagine that they, and the rest of us, are locked in a great ideological struggle for the soul of a great nation.
The vast majority of Americans, including the somewhat liberals (15%), the somewhat conservatives (24%) as well as President Obama and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords who was a Republican before she became a moderate Democrat, and millions of others, see some merit as well as some weakness in both of the perspectives Krugman delineates. This non-ideological majority would like Krugman and other ideologues on the right and the left to take a few deep breaths, perhaps take a vacation now and then, and gain a broader perspective and understanding of the world that does not cast them as heroes and villains in an epic perpetual war.
There is a great deal that the ideological perspectives from both the right and the left add to the discussion, both in describing their positive vision for America and the world, and certainly, in pointing out the weaknesses of the other side’s

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – The Fox News Channel announced today that it would mark Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech by airing an opposing view.
“For years, ‘I Have a Dream’ has been synonymous with the legacy of Martin Luther King,” said the official Fox statement. “We can think of no better way to honor that legacy than by offering a strongly-worded rebuttal.”
The Fox speech, entitled “I Have a Feverish Nightmare,” will be delivered by network host Glenn Beck.
In an excerpt released to the press, Mr.

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There was an interesting article in The New York Times recently about a new way psychologists are thinking about what factors contribute to happy and sustainable marriages. While the words “Jewish” and “intermarriage” don’t appear anywhere in the piece, I couldn’t help but notice that these new findings relate directly to the huge rise in interfaith marriages during the past several decades.
What these psychologists have found is that the strongest relationships are those in which both partners feel they are growing and benefiting as individuals. Today, “people are looking for a partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more interesting.

“Wikipedia has changed what it means to be a political fact,” says Politico. Passing along information used to be the job of reliable sources like newspapers, but now a “volunteer nation” supervises what we discover and learn. As the site celebrates its ten-year anniversary, we must recognize how far it’s come toward being accepted as a mainstream source. Skepticism has surrounded the site since its inception, The New York Times delcaring back in 2001 that it is “unclear, of course, whether the world needs another

How do you define success for your kids? This is what the Tiger Mom debate boils down to. What do we want for our children, and what does their success (or lack thereof) mean for our own identities? No matter how you feel about Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” and ground zero for the current battle over the best way to parent, you have to give her credit for being willing to ask these hard questions, and you have to really examine her answers.
Chua readily acknowledges how she defines success in her children: accomplishment. She says that Chinese mothers assume that their children are strong rather than fragile, as Western moms assume, and that they know that there’s “nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn’t.” This mantra inspires a cycle by which the mother pushes the child by any means necessary to succeed (these means are the most controversial points of Chua’s book), and then that success makes the child work harder and become even more accomplished.
You can’t argue with her results. Despite — or perhaps because of — not being allowed to watch TV, play video games, see movies, attend playdates, participate in theater or get any grade less than an A, and not to mention being yelled at, threatened and slapped by their mother, Amy Chua’s daughters Louisa and Sophia are both well on the path to being

“I don’t want to end my life,” a friend told me recently. “I just want to exit it. Sneak out the back door when no one’s looking.”
She was talking about her job, which she hates, and her career more generally, which she’s (clearly) ready to leave.
But undertaking a major career shift can be daunting — and terrifying. And many of us, faced with the sheer enormity of it all, opt to remain where we are rather than embarking on a project of this magnitude.
If you’d like to shift gears professionally but can’t quite summon the energy to begin that process, here are five concrete steps to launch that process:
Normalize it
LifeTwo, a leading career counseling organization, reports that their prior estimate that each person has an average of three careers in a lifetime is now in the process of increasing to as many as seven

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When we hit obstacles in life, too often we are tempted to get angry or give up. The best and usually least used alternative is to “workaround” that obstacle.
I was fortunate to receive an advance galley of Russell Bishop’s breakthrough book, “Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything that Stands in Your Way at Work” (McGraw-Hill, 2011).
Here are Bishop’s steps:
The steps as I understand them are simple and easy to follow:
Step 1: Own It</strong — What is, is; What isn't, isn't. Just accept that it happened.
Step 2: Desired Outcome — Now what?
Step 3: Control — What you can do without needing anyone else to move towards that desired outcome.
Step 4: Influence — What you can't do, that you will need others to provide and a plan for influencing them.
Step 5: Response-ability — What you actually do back towards the environment after you have gone through steps 1-4.
I have already used it to successfully avoid a bump in the road from turning into something much more painful and have cemented the process in my psyche to help with all future bumps and walls coming my way.
I was giving an opening session (TED like) talk to 200+ executives and leaders and was told that a few of my closing comments especially offended someone in the

The British Library unveiled its “Treasures” app this week for the iPhone and Android, allowing people to hold some of the real treasures of Western Civilization in their hand (or hands — if you have an iPad). The app gives you access to high-resolution photos of more than a hundred of the museum’s most revered documents, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original copy of the Magna Carta, and pages from Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks.
Being the geek that I am, I paid the two dollars for the app (which is a lot for me — I won’t even shell out 99 cents for the full version of “Angry Birds”). I was sold by the access to the museum’s literary manuscripts, including its thousand-year-old manuscript of the epic poem “Beowulf.” It’s arguably the first work of English Literature — though, as it’s written in Middle English, you probably won’t be able to read it (here’s a sample):
It turns out that the app only features about a dozen literary works, so you’d better be interested in the museum’s other treasures to make the it

It’s the question every parent of a newborn gets. How well does he or she sleep at night? And every new parent asks the other, related question: When will my baby sleep through the night? Ever? (Never?)
No two babies are alike. That’s true when it comes to sleep as well. I’ve heard from parents whose babies sleep, well, like a baby — through the night — as early as six weeks

Welcome to the on-going discussion about life after 50. Please join me — and other Huffington Post readers — in discussing and debating what matters most to us.
Full disclosure: I am an older mother. My first daughter was born when I was almost 38, and my youngest entered the world three days before my 41st birthday. Even though I’m 54 and going through the tumultuous teenage years, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Usually, I don’t think about it, except when I attend a meeting at my 13-year old daughter’s school and look around to see the faces of the other parents who are easily 10 years

It’s been nearly two years since the kerfuffle when Faye Dunaway made the admittedly unfortunate, off-hand remark on hearing that Hilary Duff was playing Clyde’s moll Bonnie Parker, a role Faye after all originated. Her reaction: “Couldn’t they at least cast a real actress?”
Rather than rise above it, Hilary, a performer who has every reason to be insecure about her talent, went for the jugular: “I think that my fans that are going to go see the movie don’t even know who she is, so you know… I think it was a little unnecessary but I might be mad if I looked like that now too.”
True, Faye started it, but what a nasty piece of work this Duff proved herself to be. First, she assumed her fan base would be totally ignorant of a major screen actress who appeared in some of the signature films of the past half-century (say it ain’t so!); then, she simply went after Dunaway on her age and

I arrived in Tunis on January 1, only a few days after a wave of rallies had erupted due to the suicide of an unemployed college graduate, who torched himself after police confiscated his fruit cart, cutting off his only source of income. Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, sold fruit and vegetables without the necessary vendor’s permit in the town of Sidi Bouzid, located 160 miles from the country’s capital Tunis.
At the time, Tunisians had been protesting for a couple of weeks over poor living conditions, high unemployment, government corruption and repression. Three people had been killed in the protests by the time of my arrival. The atmosphere was tense, public protests were rare in Tunisia where dissent was usually repressed; however, no one I spoke to in Tunis believed then that these demonstrations would lead to the ouster of President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali who eventually fled the country to Saudi Arabia after ruling Tunisia for 23 years.
The Jasmine Revolution as it is dubbed now was not televised on Tunisia’s main television station, Tunisie7, nor did it make headlines in the local press, but the news spread like wildfire on Facebook, YouTube, mobile phone, and to a lesser extent on Twitter (most of the tweets were from outside

As a physician, I’ve found that the biggest energy drain on my patients is relationships. Some relationships are positive and mood elevating. Others can suck optimism and serenity right out of you. I call these draining people “emotional vampires.” They do more than drain your physical

The booboisie is rattled. A 22-year-old kid in Tucson walks into a gunshop, puts down a credit card, buys a Glock machine pistol, goes to a shopping center and shoots more than a dozen people, killing a nine-year-old girl, a Federal judge, various civilians, and severely wounding a U.S. Congresswoman. During the following days, throughout the country, media journalists and their editors and producers bombard the public with cogitations about “motivation”–and think they’re doing a public service.
In psychiatry, “motivation” is a nonsense term in the context of severe mental

Click through to see how New York’s cool kids do nighttime street style — from an art exhibit at Milk Gallery, which included Wilhelmina model Coco Young, to a rock & roll party at the Royalton Hotel, with “it” kid guest Becka Diamond.
All photos: Susan Gertner
Becka Diamond
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Downtown DJ and all around cool kid Becka Diamond takes her edgy look to the next level with destroyed tights and a fierce, black motorcycle jacket.
Becka Diamond
Downtown DJ and all around cool kid Becka Diamond takes her edgy look to the next level with destroyed tights and a fierce, black motorcycle jacket.

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I’m revealing the big secret that the locals have begged me not to divulge: Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas is one of the most magical places in the United States. People visit, and they never leave. In fact, I intended to pass through the city for a three day stop during my current road trip, and over five weeks later, I am still here. I embarked on this cross-country road trip over three months ago with my dog Yoda in order to reclaim my life from the corporate