New York is home to a great deal of activities and events on any given night, spread throughout the city. No matter what your tastes or interests, there's always something to do. But what makes the search for the right activity so difficult is that they're often tucked away at locations that appeal to a particular artsy audience or socioeconomic clientele. Some bars, for instance, will orient their schedule of activities around the audience they wish to attract. Upon arriving at an event, you might then find it's either too crowded or that it appears everyone already knows one another from past get-togethers.

As a result, you might find yourself wondering if there's a place in the city that hosts a slate of fun events that draw all kinds of people in a comfortable and exciting environment. In other areas of the country, this might be called a community center, somewhere everyone can find what they're seeking from an afternoon or nighttime activity. More importantly, the center holds court for all sorts of people who wish to meet and get to know people outside of their immediate social group. The Big Apple has a place like that called 92Y Tribeca.

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There are some very high powered US-Japan events taking place this next week in Washington, the most prominent of which is titled "150 Years of Amity and 50 Years of Alliance: Adopting an Enhanced Agenda for US-Japan Partnership" co-sponsored by the Center for a New American Security, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, and the Ocean Policy Research Foundation.

The assembled great and good of US-Japan relations will be spending a lot of time talking about Futenma US Marine Air Corps Station, which may have brought down Japan's Obamaesque Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. Most of the voices will state that Hatoyama and his No. 2, Ichiro Ozawa, were flawed leaders and that the US and Japan have an opportunity to push reset with Naoto Kan and the new leadership of the Democratic Party of Japan.

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WASHINGTON -- A fledgling advocacy organization attacked CNN pollsters in April, but the transgression they alleged did not pan out. Still, the details of this dust-up help illustrate two big challenges for opinion polling: First, the growing number of cellphone-only households is making it much harder for pollsters to reach adults under 30 years old; second, when pollsters are opaque about their methods, it makes it hard for the rest of us to make sense of their data.

It all began when Our Time co-founder Matthew Segal noticed something odd in a set of tabulations published by CNN. The data was from a recent national poll conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) for the news organization. Segal and his colleagues, who advocate on behalf of under 30 Americans, were puzzled that the questions on marijuana legalization and gay marriage were broken out by demographics like age, gender and race, but included no data for the 18-to-34 age group. The pollsters had instead inserted the abbreviation "N/A" in place of the numbers.

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Futuristic, sleek, and chic -- those are the words that came to mind when we set eyes on this custom-made Hollywood Hills home. Curbed LA notes, "It took us a while to figure out whether the photo gallery set for this home was showing actual photos or renderings--what velvety, smooth images you offer, tricked out listing!"

Located in the desirable "bird streets" neighborhood above LA's famous Sunset Strip, this four bedroom, five bathroom home hit the market Sunday with a listing price of $9.9 million. The 4,000 square foot house, which boasts both city and ocean views, sits on a 10,580 square foot lot with an infinity pool and spa, both of which have LED lighting. Those who are going green will be happy to hear that the pool can be heated by gas or solar power. Also in the backyard is an art installation titled “Sprout” by artist Nancy Braver. Below the pool is a state-of-the-art home theater with underwater pool windows. Details throughout the home include Terrazzo and American walnut floors, Macassar Ebony finishes, and Silestone slabs.

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Last month, Anthony Collao was at a party held by his gay-identified friends at a house in Woodhaven when five young people, none older than 17, pushed their way inside and violence ensued. Collao, who was perceived as gay by his attackers, was beaten to death. His death reminds us that anyone can be the target of hate violence, despite their sexual orientation, gender identity, and race -- but it doesn't tell us why. What went through the minds of those five young people as they broke in and beat Callao -- a stranger to them?

A week later, another young man, Damian Furtch, was attacked by two men as he exited a MacDonald's on Seventh Avenue in the West Village. Damian has spoken publicly about this incident and recounts that two men followed him and beat him while yelling anti-gay epithets at him. Damian suffered a broken nose and bruises to his face and head and required treatment at a nearby hospital.

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"Cheer up, watch funny shows, laugh heartily and you'll stay healthy!" It's ever-present advice, but it's wrong, wrong, wrong. We hear it all the time. If you're ill, spend a few days glued to the screen watching the exuberance of "Glee" and the laugh-out-loud comedy of "Seinfeld" reruns and, so goes the common wisdom, you'll have a speedy recovery. Or even better, stay cheery and you won't get sick in the first place. Unfortunately, there's no good scientific evidence for this sort of progression. Worse, this misconception draws attention away from the real relationships between happiness, health and long life. What does science really say?

On the face of it, the idea that an Elizabeth Edwards or any other brave person riddled with cancerous tumors could laugh away the disease -- that they would get better if only they tried really hard to cheer up -- is a form of magical thinking that is terribly implausible. Of course, someone will always offer up an example -- an anecdote of a miraculous recovery -- and there are indeed rare cases of a seemingly miraculous healing. But for every miracle, millions of brave patients succumb. Was it because they did not laugh enough?

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When I first read the play "Fences" by August Wilson, it was 1993 and I had been given a second book contract to write a companion volume to my first book, "I Know What the Red Clay Looks." The companion volume would be with black men writers, and I gave it the title "Swing Low" -- an homage to the Negro spiritual, of course, but also because at that time, I very much thought about black maleness as the missing quantity in my life (I was adopted by a white family at birth, and reunited with my white birthmother when I was 11). When I thought of what that missing quantity might sound like, what I heard was a dark, honeyed hum -- a chariot chorus in the distance, coming to carry me home to the black identity I was still then creating.

"Fences," the title being a central metaphor throughout the play for walls and difficult choices, integrity and conviction, tells the story of a black family in 1950s Pittsburg led by patriarch Troy Maxson, a tragic hero whose life of highs and lows can perhaps best be summed up in this passage, with Troy trying to explain himself to his wife:

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We are a practical people who take pride in quickly finding answers to our problems. Whether working on ourselves, for which the self-help industry has an inexhaustible set of remedies, or our society, for which politicians and interest groups have an unending series of proposals, we are constantly in search of answers. But answers only help if we are asking the right questions.

Do I use this or that diet? may be the wrong question if, in fact, weight gain is due to factors that a diet alone may not address. We thus recognize that the question: why do I constantly lose and then regain weight? might lead us down a different and more revealing path. Similarly, how do we pass stricter gun control measures? is one question to ask in confronting the number of gun-related deaths in our society, especially in the aftermath of the tragic automatic weapon attack that critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others in Arizona. But it's a different question entirely to ask: what in our culture increases the potential for violence against each other? This problem of finding the right questions shows up in most aspects of our personal lives and public policy.

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Under what might now need to be termed comparatively normal circumstances, I have often agonised over helping my students understand the practical significance of critical theory. They ask, but what can one actually do with Herbert Marcuse today? In a scheduled class, it all feels so remote.

Now I can say, look: his work is a defense against injustice. Or in the more eloquent words of the London Book Bloc, inspired by its Italian counterpart, "books are our tools -- we teach with them, we learn with them, we play with them, we create with them, we make love with them and, sometimes, we must fight with them." In today's fourth, most passionate and most ungoverned national demonstration against the British government's wholesale privatization of higher education, books-as-shields replaced pens-as-swords. Creative militancy meets militant creativity, and this may be one of the most defining characteristics of the emerging student movement. It distinguishes it not only from the Chartist and 68er forebears to whom students increasingly refer, but also from many of the more traditionally rationalist responses of the most committed, but still institutionally invested, professional academics.

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I see it every day. We all hold grudges against other people who we feel have hurt or offended us in some way or another. We even hold these grudges for people who aren't alive anymore. We do this with the false idea that somehow we are making them suffer by being hurt and angry with them. Now, there is nothing wrong with being angry with someone, but it is how we express this anger that makes all the difference in us and our relationships . What is a grudge, anyway? It is harboring ill feelings toward another in the need to settle a score.

Let's try a little experiment. Think of someone in your life right now (maybe not the most extreme person) whom you are absolutely holding a grudge against right now. There is no way you are willing to forgive this person right now for his or her actions. Picture that person and hold onto that unwillingness to forgive. Now, just observe what emotions are there: anger, resentment, sadness? Also notice how you are holding your body right now: is it tense anywhere or feeling heavy? Now bring awareness to your thoughts: are they hateful and spiteful thoughts?

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I didn't know that a bunch of South Americans could make me cry so much. It wasn't just the applause, or the smiles, or the yells, from all around, of pure and utter joy. It was the way they sat, as they gripped their violins, or cellos, or trombones, the way they brandished their bows, the way they stared out at us, happy and proud. And what emerged, as those bows sliced against strings, and as smiling mouths puffed into brass tubes, was a swell of ecstatic sound that could have been the soundtrack to another welcome, a welcome that the whole world was watching.

It was Tuesday night, and if it wasn't Camp Hope, in the electric atmosphere of the Royal Festival Hall it might as well have been. What was on stage looked less like an orchestra and more like a victory parade. There were whole cohorts of double basses, massed battalions of violins. The girls, chic in grey shift dresses and court shoes, looked like extras from Mad Men. The boys, in black trousers and crisp white shirts, looked ready for their first job interview. I was bursting with pride, and I wasn't even their mother.

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I was the invisible child who did all manners of crazy things to be noticed, the teenager who had suffered abuse, rape, and the suicide of her 30-year-old mother, who fell into addiction after addiction to escape the pain of every new day, and who finally at the age of thirty buried her 15 year old son and knew that life was over. I'd been thinking about suicide off and on since the age of 8, each year with new reasons why my life wasn't worth anything and why all that I would ever know was misery.

Kahlil Gibran said, "The deeper sorrow carves into your soul, the more joy you can contain." What does that mean? Today I understand. The smartest thing that I ever did -- at what I thought was the end of my days -- was to make the decision to try something that I didn't believe would work; knowing that if it didn't, I would kill myself. I attended a 12-step meeting for alcoholics. A man there said "You never have to be alone again." That one simple statement reached into my heart, twisted it until it hurt, and helped me to decide to go back... and live.

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In this "bipartisan" age, where Democratic pusillanimity and Republican obstinacy work in tandem to undo all hopes for "change" conjured up in 2008, we must be grateful even for small victories - no matter how tentative and no matter how compromised. We should therefore welcome the defeat, so far, of efforts by Sarah Palin and her peers, and by that hapless guardian of Zion, the ADL's Abe Foxman, to prevent the construction of an Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan; and also Federal Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling overturning California's Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage after the California Supreme Court had determined its constitutionality.

In a better possible world, houses of worship would never be welcome, but only tolerated as remnants of humanity's nonage. However the actual world is still full of believers determined not to face reality squarely, and we more enlightened folk have no choice but to deal with this stubborn fact. Thus there are times when expressions of solidarity with the faithful are appropriate, notwithstanding the fact that their purchase on reality is distorted and disabling. Mosques are no better or worse than churches or synagogues. But at least the mosque at Ground Zero makes a statement.

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Losing track of billions of dollars is an invitation to corruption and abuse. But the U.S. Department of Defense seems to have done just that with Iraqi reconstruction funds set aside for the benefit of the people of Iraq. Last week, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), an independent government agency, issued a devastating audit of DOD's handling of $8.7 of the $9.1 billion targeted for reconstruction, humanitarian and other needs of the Iraqi people, describing a total "breakdown in controls" that "left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss."

Given the SIGIR's finding, how is the American or Iraqi public to know how much of the $8.7 billion was spent on building schools, highways, water mains or electric substations, as intended -- and desperately needed -- or whether some or all of it ended up in the pockets of corrupt contractors or government officials? There is plenty of reason to wonder, given that SIGIR's previous criminal investigations into the use of Iraqi reconstruction funds resulted in eight convictions of U.S. officials for bribery, fraud and money laundering. While the SIGIR report makes prospective recommendations, it fails to insist on accountability and sanctions as warranted.

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Steve Jobs says that the iPhone antenna problem "has been blown so out of proportion that it's incredible." He seems puzzled and annoyed by the intense anger, frustration, and criticism bombarding him. What he doesn't understand is that whenever you establish a monopoly, you had better make sure that your product or service is perfect - because any glitches or problems will be magnified by customers' feelings of being trapped.

Twenty years ago, when I was a manager at a large metropolitan newspaper, our advertising clients would angrily tell our sales reps: "If you guys weren't the only game in town, I'd take my business elsewhere!" Our rival newspaper had gone belly up, leaving us with a monopoly on display advertising. Our ad rates were exorbitant and every year our executives raised them. This infuriated advertisers, who felt trapped by our paper's monopoly on high-income readers. And whenever there was a typo or mistake in an ad, the client would fume helplessly because his hands were tied. Advertisers bitterly complained that our newspaper was arrogant and didn't care about customers.

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If the first priority of good performance art is to be visually interesting, the second lies in the courage of conviction. From the Kipper Kids to Karen Finley to Dan Kwong, the artist must know themselves and their work sufficiently well that they can breeze past the likelihood that they may at times look ridiculous. The artifice of performance is a universal; any club singer knows they had better rehearse their material and any stand-up comic knows they must be prepared to deal with some wise ass in the audience. Performance art knowingly strides into territory that invites unpredictable responses; that is often a central part of the point. What is often regarded as a gratuitous attempt to grab attention for its own sake is most likely a serious exploration of genuine give and take.

That's what I found striking about basketball star LeBron James' lard-filled televised announcement last night. His so-called "Decision," on its face, shared that quality of performance art. Turned out that the set and the camera editing were less than pedestrian, as though some amateur director was telling a high priced production staff loaded with state-of-the-art equipment what to do. Oh yeah, that is just what happened.

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At a Government and Oversight Reform Committee hearing this week, I testified to the devastating and deadly impacts of an unsuspecting disease: Viral Hepatitis. The fact that I was joined by Dr. Howard Koh, Assistant Secretary for Health, and Dr. John Ward, Director of the Viral Hepatitis Program at the Center for Disease Control, underscores the importance of the issue. Government oversight is a good start to getting the American public more informed, but much more is needed, according to the Institute of Medicine's 2010 report titled "Hepatitis and Liver Cancer: A National Strategy for Prevention and Control of Hepatitis B and C".

Few realize how highly infectious viral hepatitis is. Hepatitis B is 100 times more infectious than HIV. Few realize that, left untreated, it can cause liver disease, liver cancer, and premature death decades after infection. Few realize that roughly 2 billion people worldwide have been infected with Hepatitis B; over 170 million people are chronically infected with Hepatitis C; and in this nation alone, an estimated 5.3 million people are infected with either Hepatitis B or Hepatitis C. Tragically, an average of two-thirds of those infected are unaware of their status.

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Charlie Wilson's War is the only war we've won since World War II. Charlie Wilson, the late Texas Congressman, operating with the Central Intelligence Agency, routed the Russians from Afghanistan in 1989. Charlie and I served on our respective Appropriation Committees, and I kept funding the money to Charlie. The CIA operates on a "need to know" basis. I didn't know the details of the operation, but Charlie knew everything. For every problem the CIA found, Charlie provided a solution. Charlie even persuaded Israel to ship some of our stinger missiles to Pakistan to shoot down the Russian helicopters. This brought the end of the war and started the downfall of Russia.

Leaving the Senate in 2005, Charlie, thanking me for my help, told me: "We won that war because the Afghans don't like foreigners. Even the warlords don't trust each other." The White House now appoints Leon Penetta, the Director of the CIA, to succeed Bill Gates as Secretary of Defense and General David Petraeus as Director of the CIA. Secretary Gates directed the war in Afghanistan from the beginning as Director of the CIA. General Petraeus will now direct it from the CIA. Conducting wars with the CIA makes war too convenient.

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Foundation founder Kris Kelly says, "I rescue animals, but really they have rescued me." After growing up in Connecticut and moving west, Kris began volunteering at the Amanda Foundation and Lange Foundation, two LA-based animal shelters. Seeing how many abused and neglected animals came through both foundations, Kris vowed to one day start her own non-profit to save even more animals from death and neglect. This led her to eventually open the Kris Kelly Foundation, a registered 501c3 non-profit rescue group, in Los Angeles.

The Kris Kelly Foundation aims to help not only animals but also people, by bringing the two together in a way that is mutually beneficial. The foundation embraces working with the elderly and children (including teenagers), reasoning that animals need people as much as we may need animals. According to the organization itself, "The Kris Kelly Foundation embrace[s] 'Humanity' and we give dignity and a voice to the animals that need someone to do it for them."

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On May 16th, I placed my first essay in the Huffington Post which I titled, "Do as I say, not as I do." I'm a psychotherapist and marriage counselor with twenty years of experience, and the essay started off talking about my eight appearances on Oprah where I espoused the necessary ingredients for a happy marriage and a satisfying love life. After writing a few paragraphs, I revealed that I had kept a secret during those television sound bites. The secret was that, at the same time I was identified as a "relationship expert", my own marriage was crumbling. I was thoroughly surprised when I received hundreds of comments to my post. Some were so supportive that I was deeply moved. Some were so critical that I thought about disguising myself, at least, for a few weeks.

That being said, I guess I should have expected the headline "I Lied to Oprah" to be pasted above my piece, but I didn't. It certainly wasn't Oprah I'd been lying to. I honestly believed every word I said to her. It was myself I was lying to.

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It was only nine months ago that the Arts page launched on the Huffington Post, and just five months that Huffington Post Arts' Design Thursdays went into full flight. We had yet to officially celebrate in New York and with so many designers gathered in New York City for the Amory Show, we decided to use the opportunity to celebrate achievements in one evening.

It was a three prong evening at the New Museum on Bowery in New York City. At 6:00pm, Kimberly Brooks, artist and founding arts editor along with Yvonne Force Real of the Art Production Fund and artists Richard Phillips and Josephine Meckseper, hosted 60-80 special guests, NY-based bloggers and editors at the New Museum's Sky Room overlooking downtown New York City.

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After two successful years bringing major players (including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) in the water and sanitation sector together for World Water Day, it's a good time to think about taking those collaborative efforts outside the glass atriums of Washington DC and into the field.

In what amounted to a three-day conference hosted by a coalition of organizations like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, WASH Advocacy Initiative and the World Bank, sessions were held discussing issues of monitoring and evaluation and new innovations like FLOW, a platform for making monitoring and evaluation easier and scalable. In other sessions, education, health and environment sector leaders were recruited to join collaborative efforts in finding real solutions to water and sanitation challenges.

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The horrendous murder of a family from the West Bank settlement of Itamar is a terrible event of itself. But the event also represents a descent into madness and inhumanity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, at least for me, underscores inevitable and deep pessimism about the peace process.

The conflict is shot through with immorality by this point. Consider how the Israelis and Palestinians have reacted. There are reports of West Bank settlers responding as viciously and threateningly as they do when the government dismantles their outposts, as a "price tag" from the Palestinians in the area. The Israeli government itself has decided to construct 400 units in West Bank settlements to demonstrate its support for the settlers and show it will not be coerced into withdrawal. Ariel mayor Ron Nachman blamed left-wing journalists in Israel for contributing to delegitimization of the settlements and therefore setting the stage for such attacks.

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WASHINGTON -- CBSNews.com has been building a growing audience, passing ABC News and Fox News in online traffic late last year. 

Part of the success around the network's growth has been by streaming programming on popular live portals with channels on Livestream and Ustream, in addition to the network's live player.

Live programming engages an audience in a significant way, explains Mark Larkin, VP for CBSNews.com.  He says growth has always come from the video centric redesign of the site, search optimization and the deployment of social media tools.

CBS News also publishes clips on its YouTube channel.

Larkin was a participant at the Beet.TV Video Journalism Summit at The Washington Post earlier this month.

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BEIRUT -- In the long-delayed modern Arab revolt for dignity, rights and freedom, Tunisia was the trigger, but Egypt is the prize. The Arab popular struggle against autocratic security and police states that was finally initiated earlier this month with the revolt that overthrew former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has reached a critical point in Egypt during the past four days. Events reached their tipping point Sunday and are likely to lead quickly to a political transition that replaces President Hosni Mubarak with a new leadership that more accurately reflects political sentiments in the country.

As happened in Tunisia, the revolt against Mubarak and his colleagues occurred very quickly, within a few weeks after young people demonstrated in the streets and called for the removal of the regime. Yet that daring challenge to a powerful police state reflected decades of mass humiliation among ordinary citizens who finally snapped in January 2011 and refused to continue living in a system that denied them their basic citizenship rights. Protesters also want to change the 30-year-old rule of the Mubarak regime because it has been marked by sustained mass mediocrity in the governance realm that in turn resulted in Egypt's pauperization and marginalization.

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If you want to understand what the U.S. faces today with no prospect of bringing unemployment down to 3 or 4 percent you need to read Since Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's book written in 1939 about the Depression years in America. Allen was the editor of Harpers magazine. In 1930 he had written a classic book about the events and attitudes that marked the Roaring 20s. Since Yesterday, on the Depression decade is more relevant today.

What Allen shows is that the businessmen of the 1920s, who had inspired awe, those who Calvin Coolidge called the "Big Men" of the country, and who the country had admired and trusted, were completely discredited by 1933 when Roosevelt took office. Herbert Hoover had gamely taken the advice of the Big Men and it failed him. They had no idea how to end the Depression. Andrew Mellon, Treasury Secretary to Coolidge and Hoover and one of the richest men in America, and Samuel Insull, the Chicago-based "leverager" of utility stocks were facing de facto exile. Richard Whitney, once head of the NY Stock Exchange would eventually go to prison in handcuffs. By 1932, these erstwhile "masters of the universe" were the object of almost universal scorn.

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(From: Beautiful/Decay) I first met Wendell after we interviewed him for an issue of B/D a few years back. You never know what artists will be like when you actually meet them but Wendell's been one of the most sincere artists I've met in a while. We've been trading studio visits for around a year now and will be in a group show together later this month at Pedersen Projects in Pomona. Wendell is also getting ready for a solo show in October at Kravets|Wehby and a group show at Galerie Jean-Luc&Takako Richard in Paris so I stopped by his studio to check out the progress. Turns out Wendell had a studio jam packed full of massive paintings well on their way to being finished.

Before I get into images of the paintings let me break down Wendell's process. He usually starts each piece with a list of notes and descriptions of various stories, scenes and images. As these lists develop, he comes up with ways to connect them together to create complex narratives. Sometimes the story is evident, and sometimes they are private narratives that turn into coded abstractions.

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The Education Trust's recent report "Subprime Opportunity: The Unfulfilled Promise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities" documents the way that private for-profit colleges are cashing in on the current financial crisis by offering disadvantaged students an opportunity to earn degrees during a time when public universities and colleges are reducing their enrollments. The catch is that the vast majority of these students never graduate, and the only thing they accomplish is racking up huge student loans. According to this report, "only 22 percent of students who enroll in four-year-degree programs at for-profit colleges graduate within six years, compared with 55 percent and 65 percent at public and private nonprofit colleges, respectively."

One reason why the students at these schools often fail to complete their programs is that these institutions pour much of their money into marketing and compensation for senior administrators, while they short-change classroom instruction and student services. Furthermore, these schools now receive most of their income through federal student aid, and the result is that taxpayers are supporting a system where lower- and middle-class students go into debt in order to bring profits to wealthy corporations.

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