With the holiday shopping season upon us, Americans are holding their collective breaths for an economic turnaround, but one statistic suggests that more tough times are ahead.  According to the Labor Dept., the unemployment number for Americans aged 16-24 is now over 53%, the highest it’/… Read full post »

Remember that golden age when cat eating aliens could be your neighbor?  Or how about when an idealistic immigrant from Mypos could move into an apartment in Chicago with his high strung cousin?  Remember when Denise made a wacky shirt for Theo.  Believe it or not, there was a time/… Read full post »

I’ll admit I haven’t read the book yet, although I’d like to, but I’ve been keeping up with the press on Jonathan Safron Foer’s new book “Eating Animals,” an investigation on the ethics of factory farms and eating meat.  For an animal lover, the mo/… Read full post »

As a writer and journalist, I have long valued the journalistic creed of objectivity.  I tend to think that the idea of the liberal media bias exists because most journalists have liberal arts educations where left leaning views are often fostered.  However, for a good journalist the goal/… Read full post »

Religion has been a thorny issue roughly since the time Abraham began wandering through the desert with his wife Sarah, uncovering in his travels that first real sense of the human tendency towards tribalism.  Or, if you prefer, it’s been an issue since Zeus started having sex with everyt/… Read full post »

The recent media standoff between the Obama White House and Fox News may make for good copy for the conservative cable station, but the precedent being set for free speech is far more odious--essentially it’s say what you want, unless I don’t like what you say.  First Amen/… Read full post »

Unless your spacecraft just landed last week, I’m guessing that you’re familiar by now with the new order of things over at NBC’s 10pm time slot.  In an attempt to focus solely on cost effectiveness, the network has tossed any attempt at real programming for the archaic comedy/… Read full post »

A short while ago the New Yorker ran an article by Malcolm Gladwell in which the physical trauma incurred by football players and the risk reward of the NFL were compared to the cruel sport of dogfighting.  Essentially, football players take so many concussive hits over the course of/… Read full post »

Common sense has now officially gone out the window.  An article in today’s New York Times perfectly illustrates the degradation of American intelligence when it comes to all things reasonable.  In Newark, Delaware, a six year old was suspended for 45 days because he brough/… Read full post »

As I finished loading the last of my groceries onto the conveyor belt, I noticed that I had inadvertently begun to hum the opening bars of “Sweet Caroline” to myself.  This was more due to the song being played over the market’s speaker system and less to do with my/… Read full post »

The word on the street is that people are a whole lot angrier these days.  Town hall meetings, Serena Williams, and that douche in the Escalade running everyone off the road all seem to give weight to this theory.  There does seem to be more anger in the air, although/… Read full post »

Ever missed a voting opportunity and endured the harsh moralizing of friends and relatives who wax less than lyrically over your civic duty and all of that.  Or maybe you didn’t head down to the polls but told everyone that you did, claiming that your “I Voted” sticker must ha/… Read full post »

So you may have thought foreign oil, bottled water, or SUV’s were the scourge of the environment, but apparently you are wrong.  The freshly minted responsibility for the destruction of the Earth falls squarely across the supple and delicate backsides of the American population.  An/… Read full post »

I’m guessing that you’ve heard by now the not so new scheme of “curing” American obesity with the heroically misguided idea of taxing soda.  So far New York City and San Francisco are at the forefront of this gem, but I imagine that the rest of the country is not/… Read full post »

Sometime around the mid-16th century, a man from Aleppo and a man from Damascus got together in Istanbul and opened the first ever coffee house.  It quickly became a mecca for music, story telling, and political discourse.  Flash forward 450 years to the descendant of their creation, a cor/… Read full post »

I was watching an old well worn favorite the other night, Garden State, Zach Braff’s ode to late twenties malaise when something struck me.  Yes this is about a five year old movie, but bear with me, because it’s not really about a five year old movie.  What struck me/… Read full post »

The spiking popularity of Facebook, Twitter, online networking, and other sources of digital community are to me less surprising then they are inevitable.  Especially for Americans.  I think that the cultural pattern of isolation in this country, policy isolationism, familial isolation, an/… Read full post »

I may very well be a 21st Century digital boy who doesn’t know how to live but, frankly, I’m a bit disappointed at my lot of toys.  Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, pop culture led me to believe that a certain amount of technological advancements would be made/… Read full post »

As I peered out my kitchen window this morning into a blanket of smokey air, hoping that this batch of California wild fires won’t destroy any more homes, I couldn’t help but reflect on what it’s like to live in the most disaster prone state in the union.  Of course, /… Read full post »

The other day I was sweating off half of my body weight while waiting at a light on my motorcycle when a middle aged guy on a Harley pulled up.  As is rarely the case, the guy nodded at me, so I nodded back.  Since I ride a small Italian/… Read full post »

It’s late August and like every late August I’m am once again ensconced in the comfort of Saturday morning soccer watching.  What’s that you say, the MLS season has been going on since April?  Why haven’t I, a professed fan of the game, been watching Saturday soccer/… Read full post »

“We’re into growing up, women of the future hold the big revelations.”  I was pondering this lyric yesterday by U2’s Bono while reading a piece in the New York Times on women in the military.  Knowing a little background on Bono and his reverence for women/… Read full post »

If you are the kind of person who follows the cultural zeitgeist, you probably fall into one of two categories.  You either think of yourself as a cool or you are the unrepentant geek, the type to consistently use words like overrated  and underrated when examining music, movies, graphic n/… Read full post »

Last fall, amidst a groundswell of optimism and a campaign based on hope and change, Barack Obama was elected into office to fix a country in desperate need of help.  Now, seven months into his presidency, with his approval ratings on a downward slide, Obama is fighting battles on multiple/… Read full post »