After Barack Obama won the presidency with large majorities in the House and Senate, some commentators proclaimed that the president-elect had permanently altered the American political landscape, creating what the writer John Judis called "the Democratic realignment of 2008." For instance, former Clinton adviser Lanny J. Davis announced that Obama and his party were "likely to create a new governing majority coalition that could dominate American politics for a generation or more."

Just two years later, however, many observers are faulting Obama for failing to prevent what seems likely to be an electoral debacle for the Democrats. Conservatives have tended to claim that the public has rejected the President's policy agenda, while pundits and Democrats (including Judis) have faulted Obama for not "connecting" with the American people and for failing to employ a more effective message.

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Since Google unveiled the new "Google Instant" this week, people have already been coming up with some pretty creative ways to use it. It also looks like the feature, which allows search results to appear as you type, may be sparking a music video meme. You probably saw Google's own version of this with Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," which consists of someone typing the lyrics into Google and having the results appear at the same time the lyrics are said. Whirled.com also got in on the fun with a similar version of Tom Lehrer's "The Elements." Now, Urlesque is keeping the meme train going with this version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire," which happens to be, in our opinion, the best of the lot so far. These videos seem to be easy to make and are highly entertaining, even if just as an example of how neat the feature is. Check it out and see what we mean!

WATCH:

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As the Park51 community center and mosque project near Ground Zero is painted as an issue of the rights and future of the American Muslim community, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has been challenged to demonstrate that he is a moderate voice for Islam. By portraying the mosque issue as one of American Muslim rights the community is forced to align itself with an Imam who may not represent our true center.

I first met Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in 2002 at his NYC apartment where a group of young Muslim professionals had gathered for a study circle. After the events of 9/11 many Muslims in NYC were struggling to find their place within American society. Imam Feisal and his wife Daisy Khan filled the void and continue to create venues for Muslims to meet and discuss their faith without prejudice. This work is exemplified by the projects undertaken through their American Society of Muslim Advancement (formerly the American Sufi Muslim Association), the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow Project (MLT), the Cordoba Initiative, the Listening to Islam documentary, and the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, amongst others. I, along with many other Muslims, have been privileged to be part of some of these programs.

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School's almost back in session, and Los Angeles Magazine spent the whole summer reviewing the city's best offerings for tots, tweens, and teens. This year's best summer camp was New York Film Academy, and just in time for fall, they've also weight in on the best French-Language school in Los Angeles. For the artistically inclined, there's the best drum circle, children's concert, and arts education program to check out on the weekends. And for kids who want to give back, food pantry SOVA takes volunteers as young as 8 years old.

For the rest of this list and more of the Best of Los Angeles, check out Los Angeles Magazine.

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I'm a huge True Blood fan. I've read the books, I've watched every episode. As far as I'm concerned, vampires have not overstayed their welcome. Alright, maybe the Twilight vampires. I just got a chance to chat with Lindsay Pulsipher who plays Jason Stackhouse's love interest, Crystal. (I did her makeup for the upcoming film, Do Not Disturb.) She had a pretty big revelation this week. And yes, we do mention what it was. If you're afraid of spoilers, I'll mark it in the question so you can skip that one. Lindsey gives us all the info about playing a character who is constantly sporting a black eye, nudity on camera and what it's been like to work with an engaged couple planning a wedding on set. Of course I'm talking about the recently married Anna Paquin and Steven Moyer. She also lets us know what it's like to have wild animals on set. No, I'm not talking about her co-stars. (Please, Charlaine Harris fans. If you've read the books, don't spoil plot points in the comments section without a spoiler alert!)

Did you watch the show before you auditioned for True Blood?

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It's time for the human brain to look to the future, but what will that future be? There's a lot of updating going on already. The brain is making bigger news than genes, which wasn't so twenty years ago. The standard model of the brain was a stable, porrridgy gray mass that couldn't heal itself or even grow new brain cells. A standard way to warn about the damage done by alcohol was to point out how many million brain cells were killed off by heavy drinking, cells that would never be replaced. But this old brain model has proved to be either wrong or incomplete.

The latest model reverses most of the accepted beliefs from the past. We now see the brain as dynamic, not fixed. Its processes are so "soft-wired" that new pathways are formed by everyday behavior, habits, and conditioning. Stem cells exist in the brain, allowing for newborn neurons at every stage of life. And the injured brain can regenerate and heal itself, shifting a lost function to a new, undamaged area of itself. None of these things are disputed anymore. Everyone in the field is excited about the next big breakthroughs in neurology, whatever they may be.

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The majority of Americans want the Obama Administration to establish a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, CBS News reports. 54% think the U.S. should set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, with 41% opposed. Among Democrats, 73% think the U.S. should set a timetable, with 21% opposed; among independents, 54% support a withdrawal timetable, with 40% opposed; among Republicans, 32% support a withdrawal timetable, with 66% opposed.

Two weeks ago today, Members of the House of Representatives were polled on a similar proposition, when the House voted on an amendment introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern [D-MA], Rep. David Obey [D-WI], and Rep. Walter Jones [R-NC] that would have required the President to establish a timetable for the redeployment of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. That amendment failed, with 153 Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, voting yes, and 98 Democrats voting no; while 9 Republicans voted yes and 162 Republicans voted no. So in the McGovern-Obey-Jones "poll," Democrats in the House were 60%-38% in favor of a withdrawal timetable, while House Republicans were 91%-5% against.

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The Unified Command of the oil spill clean-up response announced Thursday that some of the workers will finally be provided with respirators. This welcome announcement was tempered by the contrary assertion - also from the Unified Command - that the workers don't really need respirators. In a CNN story today, "Chris Coulon, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the Unified Command, said air sampling is being conducted and there is "no indication at all" that the respirators being distributed are necessary."

Apart from the obvious question of why someone from the Department of Agriculture is making pronouncements about the need (or lack of need) for respirators for oil clean-up workers, I really have to wonder again about what's going on out there. There are still major gaps in the publicly-available data, and there are still these contradictory pronouncements coming out of BP and the various federal agencies.

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In my novels I have always been interested in highly charged erotic triangles --- in What Is Left The Daughter the characters of Tilda, Wyatt, and Hans --- all living in close quarters in a small village in Nova Scotia during WWII -- are no exception.

In the natural course of things, a novelist is sometimes asked what are the autobiographical sources of a particular story or what are the historical facts that inform the story. Well, imagination itself is autobiographical ---when David Mamet was asked where he got his ideas, he replied, "I think them up." Yet while writing What Is Left The Daughter, it was imagination working in concert with basic incidents and circumstances of people's lives during wartime that I discovered during my yearly travels in Nova Scotia that made for a duet between fact and fiction. I was especially interested in the reactions of people when German U-boats began their lethal attacks on passenger ferries off the coast, and how individual families were effected. In my novel, the visiting German philology student Hans Mohring, in the wrong place at the wrong time, is caught up in the bewildering and passionate grief of a village.

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Urban Design is a book published last year, but it is a collection of 18 essays that Harvard Design Magazine (HDM) published in 2006-07 to mark the 50th anniversary of a fabled conference on urban design that took place at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1956. This conference aimed to establish the field of urban design as both a subject for academic study and a realm of practice both incorporating and independent of architecture and city planning. The book includes excerpts from the proceedings of the 1956 conference, and it concludes with the transcript of a discussion on "Urban Design Now" held at Harvard in 2006 among some of the contributors to the book as well as other urban designers and critics. GSD professor Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders, editor of HDM, edited the book.

Urban Design is an excellent guide to both the history of Urban Design as a field and today's conflicts both within and without. For that I recommend it highly. What's unfortunate, however, is that the adjective that pervades the sense of the book is "despair." One cannot read these essays without reflecting on how disastrous the past 50 years have been for cities.

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Perhaps the most important moment in gender politics in America occurred at a kitchen table in Chicago late in 1953. A young man named Hugh Hefner borrowed a thousand dollars from his mom to publish a magazine that was originally going to be called Stag Party. But apparently there was already a Stag magazine about horses. At that kitchen table, Hefner put together the first issue of his new magazine and decided to name it Playboy after a automobile company that his mom had once worked at. He featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover, who had just landed her first leading role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and was yet to reach icon status.

Fifty-eight years later, Hugh Hefner, now 84, gave up dating two twins simultaneously to marry 24-year-old Crystal Harris. In the years since launching his magazine, Hefner has sparked a profound change in American culture that continues to frame the way we look at sex and gender. The first mass-market magazine to show naked women, Playboy gave birth to pornography as we have come to know it -- a business that has blossomed into arguably the biggest single media industry in our country.

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"The bus is loading up." At least, that's what my soul sister Judith Rich and I call it when death is in the air, and our friends are traveling into realms beyond where our progressive lens can see, or our monkey minds can fathom. Funny, or not so funny, how death seems to come in clusters. What's that old adage about the Big D coming to gather in threes? And, when it does arrive at our door, let us hope that it does so only when we have cultivated a well-lived life.

Having attended and delivered far too many memorial services over the past year, there has been more than ample opportunity to notice whose life seems to have been best lived, and whose remained anemic. For one thing, have you ever noticed that when the speaker is marching through the litany of achievements and honors of the deceased's résum@eacute;, the room "flatlines," faces going pale? But the nanosecond mention is made of what the "graduate" loved, the room comes alive. It's as if the heat's been turned up a notch, and waves of animation move through the crowd. People become animated, some finding the freedom to smile or chuckle.

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Japan lies devastated by a giant wave and its geological, nuclear, financial, sociological, and psychological aftershocks.

A natural event, deep underwater, sets in motion circumstances that evince how defenseless we are to the power of the ocean unleashed. What more will it take to demonstrate the stupidity of those who continue to subvert the scientific study of ocean and climate systems to meet their short-term interests? How many people have to die? How often do we have to witness the physical and emotional collapse that follows these disasters? Are we safe because the destruction is elsewhere? Do we think these circumstances cannot inundate us as well at some future time? We are far less prepared and we are doing everything we can to dismiss the threat, to discredit and de-fund the science, and to eliminate the early warning systems that in this case may have saved thousands of lives, but not nearly enough. And when marine disasters do occur within our own waters -- Katrina or Deep Water Horizon for example -- within months we revert to our narrow, foolish, ignorant ways, forgetting the victims, enabling the perpetrators, sabotaging the alternatives, denying the facts, and compromising our environmental protections, indeed our very survival.

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What would you do with $1 trillion? Unfortunately, one of Washington, D.C.'s answers over the last decade has been, "waste it on two wars that make us less safe and cause deep suffering at home and abroad." The true costs of those bad decisions will be paid by today's youth, since policymakers failed to raise the revenue to pay for it when they started the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, nobody in D.C. asked the young people what they'd do with that money. So, next week, some of those youth are going to Washington to tell them in person.

Late last year, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the National Priorities Project sponsored a youth film-making contest called, "If I Had A Trillion Dollars." Entrants had to be age 13-23 and had to produce a video around one to three minutes in length addressing the $1 trillion cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. In January, the panel of judged picked two winners, both of which are embedded below, to receive the first place prize: $500 and a trip to Washington, D.C. to screen their film for Members of Congress, the Obama Administration and the press.

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I'm a busy guy with a fair number of responsibilities, but I love my free time. Being absolutely unproductive, whether alone or with my wife, kids, and dog, at the beach or reading a book on the couch at two in the afternoon, is what makes life worth living. I imagine you're all pretty similar in that regard. It's what we're all looking for, after all -- to have gotten all the important stuff done so you can rest easy and simply be.

I've got enough work in my life to fill several, so when it comes to staying fit, healthy and strong, I'm not looking for a second job. I tried that for a couple decades as a marathoner and triathlete, and I was miserable (not to mention unhealthy and weak, but that's another article). I want the most bang for my buck. Yet when most people discuss fitness, they speak in terms of work. It's right there in the word: "workout." And since work is supposed to be hard and unpleasant, good workouts become long, dreary things, exercises in pain and suffering that you have to push through. No pain, no gain, right? It's all very Puritan. But is it true?

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Every single American and every person thinking of going to business school (and especially those in Business School) needs to see the documentary, Inside Job. This film is one of the most powerful, well-made and brave documentaries I have ever seen, and I have seen a heck of a lot of docs having been a programmer and documentary producer/director for the last two decades. I do not understand why this film is not being distributed widely, as it deserves a massive budget to promote it and the message it communicates so well. It needs to be shown to all high school students as a warning and should be required for all undergraduates who decide to study Economics, Business, Marketing, Women's Studies, Education... basically everyone should see it.

Because not understanding what has happened is already leading us to repeat our mistakes. Don't be fooled, those who created this depression, and we must call it what it is, are still in positions of power, and are still being paid huge sums of money to influence the economy, and worst of all, young people who are the future generations who will one day be running the businesses, economy, governments of the world.

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As a serious sugar addict still struggling with my "addiction" I know first hand how difficult it is to get off sugar, and to stay off it. Part of the reason it's so hard to kick the habit is that over time our brains actually become addicted to the natural opioids that are triggered by sugar consumption. Much like the classic drugs of abuse such as cocaine, alcohol and nicotine, a diet loaded with sugar can generate excessive reward signals in the brain which can override one's self-control and lead to addiction.

One study out of France, presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, showed that when rats (who metabolize sugar much like we do) were given the choice between water sweetened with saccharin and intravenous cocaine, 94 percent chose the saccharin water. When the water was sweetened with sucrose (sugar), the same preference was observed -- the rats overwhelmingly chose the sugar water. When the rats were offered larger doses of cocaine, it did not alter their preference for the saccharin or sugar water. Even rats addicted to cocaine, switched to sweetened water when given the choice. In other words, intense sweetness was more rewarding to the brain than cocaine.

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Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is 26 years old, a billionaire, the subject of a new Aaron Sorkin movie and a profile in The New Yorkerhttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas, and now (we think) the youngest ever $100 million dollar donor. Mashable reported last night that Zuckerberg is set to announce the gift on Oprah on Friday.

The gift is notable for a couple of reasons. It's one of very few reported 9 figure gifts in America so far this year. Most big giving this year is happening as part of The Giving Pledge. Most of those gifts will go into private foundations and be paid out over time. Other direct gifts this year include George Soros' recent gift to Human Rights Watch and Mark Benioff's gift to UCSF for a children's hospital.

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We have seen massive shifts in the mobile space over the past three years. In the US alone there are 42.7 million smartphones. Arguably we can say that Apple ignited the revolution of the smartphone ecosystem -- back in January 9, 2007. Since then -- the consumer's rapid adoption of the smartphone has been voracious. We are witness to this phenomenon -- massive adoption of the mobile Internet, an enormous library of mobile applications and the colossal consumption of content on smart-devices.

Apple alone cannot take the credit for this mobile Renaissance -- Google has also played a strategic role in the space. Google's Android operating system has set in motion a firestorm of smartphones. Companies such as Motorola, LG and Samsung quickly adopted the OS and began to rapidly release branded smartphones.

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What makes people think spitting in public is okay? From Chinatown to Midtown, from Bushwick to Bayside, Gothamites openly expel their esophageal waters with impunity. It's gross. And, unlike other now hopelessly ingrained NYC rudeness's -- not letting people off the subway before getting on or halting the flow pedestrian traffic to selfishly inventory an iPhone -- spitting in public is illegal. Yet why is it the one quality of life offense that is never enforced? Why unlike other public disposals of bodily fluids -- defecation, urination -- has expectoration been granted social acceptance?

Is spitting somehow cool? I know kids imitate baseballs players who dribble saliva in a perpetual, effortless, un-self-conscious style. Then there's the finesse spitter, who can spritz an emission between his teeth while cutely tweeting a spray bottle noise. And who can not admire the manly deep throated reach-back hawking that presages itself with an audible warning that sounds like the searching between radio stations static, progresses with a circling up of the lips as if about to blow a smoke ring and ends with an explosive firing out of a saliva-mucous bullet, sometimes aimed indiscriminately and other times with marksmen-like precision. In all three instances I am repulsed.

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So, who is Alex Sink? Well, she is the Chief Financial Officer of the State of Florida and she's running as a Democrat to be the next governor of Florida. Oh, that's right, the Florida gubernatorial election! If you've heard any news about this race at all, it's probably been confined to the messy, hostile race between the two candidates vying for the GOP nomination: Florida Attorney General and anti-gay crusader Bill McCollum and Medicare fraud-king Rick Scott.

At some point, Sink is going to have to aggressively promote herself, but for the time being, her campaign is content to leverage the McCollum-Scott mudslinging as a way of setting herself apart. So, she's got an ad out this week, that takes the fray on the GOP side and creates a montage of toxic infighting. You'll note that while the ad paints both of her would-be opponents in a bad light, it notes that Scott is the de facto favorite in the race, so McCollum's specific criticism of Scott's fraudster past has found its way into the clip.

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This war of words between President Obama and General Petraeus has profound implications on the U.S. counterterrorism strategy across the globe. Affecting high-level diplomatic discourse, to the way in which the entire U.S. military understands and defines the terrorist threat, to the policies and practices currently underway to engage America's enemies, the Obama Administration's new policy on defining the threat of terrorism as one devoid of any relation to Islam is directly at odds with the U.S. army's doctrine on counterinsurgency (COIN), a field manual written by the new Commanding General of Afghanistan, General David Petraeus.

President Obama's chief national security advisor for counterterrorism, John Brennan, recently revealed a new White House rhetorical policy regarding terrorism: detach all references made to Islam, including any statement that makes mention of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or any other group. This marks a significant shift in defining the terrorist threat to the United States, and will likely contribute to the easing of tensions carved for nearly a decade between the West and the Islamic world, but is it a smart shift in policy or an ill-guided misunderstanding of the threat facing America?

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The US for the first time in this tournament will play in a game with nothing to lose. Yes, the US might be slight favorites to advance over Ghana, but even if the US team loses it will be seen as a successful World Cup in which they played well and demonstrated immense resolve. But free of the pressure of expectations, this is when the US team has historically been its most successful and most dangerous.

While the US should be care free, the Ghanaians will play representing an entire continent. As the only African team to advance out of their group, the Ghanaians have taken on the mantle of Africa's team and they will likely be embraced as such by the South African fans. In short, the US are not going to be just taking on Ghana they are taking on Africa. But how Ghana plays under the pressure of such expectations is an open question. Despite expectations that South African crowds would lift each African team, the fact is that almost all of the African teams have been real disappointments thus far. Ghana advanced, but did so despite losing their last game and were aided by Australia's surprise victory over Serbia.

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It's an old story, but it never fails to shock--trading cash and equivalents for votes at the International Whaling Commission, the international convention that sets rules about the treatment of whales in the world's oceans.

Even though young people in Japan are hardly interested in eating whale meat, the government is still committed to killing whales, and seeks each year greater validation from the IWC for its currently unauthorized whale-killing gambits. The upcoming meeting, the 62nd annual gathering, starts in a couple of days in Agadir, Morocco. This year, the run up to the IWC meeting has been intense and fraught with controversy. The participating nations have been deliberating for some months already on the merits of a proposal that would suspend the commercial whaling moratorium, and allow Japan, Norway, and Iceland to hunt whales openly, under a system proponents claim will feature monitoring by the IWC and a schedule for reduction in catch over ten years.

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Why should we listen up to Tricky Stewart, of RedZone Entertainment shouting about his new voice-of-now and Swedish-born beauty Ulrika Lindstrom? That is, apart from the fact that he's bagged hits with Beyonce's "Single Ladies," Mya's "Case of the Ex," Rihanna's "Umbrella," Mary J. Blige's "Just Fine" and Justin Bieber's "Baby"...

It's not a list of accolades to be sniffed at. But the way we all seem to hear about new musical talent is through American Idol, Britain's Got Talent, or another television-based incarnation of musical democracy, laden heavily with Schadenfreude. Average Joe (i.e. not the son or daughter of actor/pop star X) slides through one of these trusted channels, where lives go from mediocre-to-media darling, sparkling with instant overnight fame powder, all double stamped by the singles-buying public. If they haven't got that in their fame passport, how on earth are they found on this over-crowded, hyper-connected planet? (A rhetorical question.) Does old-fashioned hard work and raw talent count for anything these super-networked days? (Not a rhetorical question.)

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The tide is changing. Rhetoric on the 80 million strong Generation Y is softening. Last year, Gen Y was labeled lazy slackers with unrealistic work expectations. This year, they are simply slow starters who have been humbled by the current economic environment.

I'm encouraged that Gen Y is getting a better shake, but I keep wondering if Gen Y is changing or if our perceptions of Gen Y are changing? It could be both; I'm just throwing it out there. Take the discussion of Gen Y living at home longer with their parents. While it's easy to pass judgment and write them off as not having their act together, new studies indicate that parental assistance in early adulthood isn't such a bad thing. In fact, it can be a good thing -- leading to autonomy and resiliency.

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Warren Buffet is involved in a situation in which he is deciding whether one of his employees, David Sokol, did something wrong and possibly illegal when he bought close to $10 million in Lubrizol stock prior to Buffet's firm, Berkshire Hathaway, making an offer to buy the company. Buffet should be careful in his defense of Sokol that it wasn't just Sokol who did something wrong here and quite possibly illegal.

In a letter to Berkshire's shareholders, Buffet defends Sokol by saying that Sokol notified Buffet of his substantial position in Lubrizol prior to Buffet's decision to acquire the company, and that Sokol had no authority to give final approval for acquisitions at Berkshire. Green-lighting a potential merger candidate was solely the purview of Buffet, his vice-chairman, Charlie Munger, and the Berkshire board.

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U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), the new chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, is sponsoring federal legislation aimed at blocking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from updating Clean Air Act pollution standards. Today his committee is expected to pass Upton's "bad air bill" in a largely party-line vote. The Republican majority in the House expects to pass the bill before the Easter recess.

Obviously, people should be very alarmed by Rep. Upton's legislation because preventing EPA from doing its job of updating and enforcing Clean Air Act standards would pose a severe health threat to us all. But I decided to tackle this serious threat in a not-so-serious way: by creating a parody song about the bill based on the classic Billy Joel hit "Uptown Girl."  With the help of my colleauge Lauren Zingarelli we hope you enjoy this Karaoke-style video we created.

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On the first anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, I travelled to the Leogane region of Haiti, the center of the earthquake's devastation. I went as the guest of an Israeli NGO called Tevel b'Tzedek (The Earth, in Justice) founded in 2005 by Rabbi Micah Odenheimer to promote social and environmental justice in the world. With the support of IsraAid a team of Israeli volunteers travelled to the region soon after the earthquake. Uri l'Tzedek, a U.S. based Orthodox social justice organization, asked me to be the first of a series of rabbis to visit the team and interact with many of the Haitians that they have been helping.

Haiti is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Its per capita income is about $350/ year. Haitians expect nothing from their government. It has been ruled by a succession of leaders who have either been ruthless dictators or incompetents. The $15 billion dollars of aid that poured into the country after the earthquake and the hundreds of NGOs on the ground can barely make a dent in the country's problems because there are no government agencies that have effectively coordinated the aid effort.

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