Nose-to-tail eating sounds like a trend, but it's really just good practice. Indeed, even before British chef Fergus Henderson made "whole beast" cooking popular, the whole animal was getting used. Slaughterhouses big and small make sure to use every bit of every animal -- that's how they make their money: livers go into dog food, bones get made into gelatin, etc. The real treat of nose-to-tail is more about getting the whole animal onto your plate. And that comes down to a matter of supporting your farmer. They make more money selling a half a pig or a few ducks directly to consumers and chefs than they do selling their animals to processing plants, which cuts it all up and sends the different pieces off to supermarkets, pet food processors, and who knows where else.

This week's episode explores the pleasure of using the whole animal in the home kitchen. The tender "center cuts" (breast, tenderloin, etc.) are not the only parts worth eating; in fact they are often not even the best. In the case of duck, it's a great gateway cooking experience to full on nose-to-tail: all of the parts are delicious and easy to prepare, it just takes a little time. Watch this video to see ducks turned into sausage, pate, rillette, stock, prosciutto, and confit and check out the Ruhlman/Henderson/Keller influenced recipes.

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A light snow was falling as my producers and I drove 3 ½ hours to an abandoned hotel in an aging, one-horse town which put me in mind of a 1950's Sears catalogue, miles and miles away from just about everything. When Justin Morales (Co-Executive Producer and President of production company Cool Hand Pictures) first showed me the photos, I was practically beside myself with excitement. This place had everything we wanted and looked exactly like the hotel of my imagination as I was writing "The Calicoon": a decaying four-story, several-hundred-foot-long, white-washed wooden structure set high atop a hill, with a long, tree-lined road which gently wound its way around to a circular drive in front of the building so that, in days gone by, guests would have been wowed as they approached and then easily greeted and tended to by a solicitous, well-trained staff.

Standing there in the freezing cold, looking at the desolation, it was so easy to imagine a bright summer day and a 1950's family stepping out of their Buick and stretching after their long ride from the Bronx, then being set upon by cheerful, brightly-uniformed bellhops with painted-on smiles who would greet them with "Good afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg, and welcome to The Hotel Liberty. How was your drive from the city?" Then they'd unload way too much luggage from the truck of the car onto a shiny brass cart and then lead the way indoors.

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A few days before the 1988 election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, I attended a rally on the University of California campus where I was enrolled in my last year of college. Although it was reasonably clear by then that Bush was going to win the election, we still held out hope the Dukakis could somehow make a surprise comeback and bring about the end of the Reagan era. One of the speakers at that rally was the mayor of Santa Cruz, the town where the university was located. The mayor, who was probably about 15-20 years older than most of the students in the room began his comments by saying "You think you're tired of Ronald Reagan?" After pausing for dramatic effect, he continued "Well, Ronald Reagan signed my diploma from UC Santa Cruz."

The students burst into applause as the mayor, a well liked progressive, summarized the feeling of exhaustion and frustration which a generation of progressive Californians felt towards President Reagan. Between 1967, the year I was born, and 1989, a few months before I graduated from college, Ronald Reagan was a constant presence in California. He had been our governor, our president or a candidate for president a generation or more. Reagan's extraordinary ability to put Hollywood polish on the politics of the western version of the far right, made him a uniquely Californian political presence; and by 1988 we were anxious to be rid of him.

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Former Utah governor and current U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman has quit his post and will return to the States at the end of April to "position" himself for a run at the presidency. You can mark me down as a guy who thinks Huntsman has legit White House ambitions -- as a top-tier candidate, even. But in 2012? No, no: Jon Huntsman is making a mistake.

Conversant in both Mandarin and modernity, with a managerial background in both the public and private sector, Huntsman has been slowly building an enviable political portfolio. Like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, he projects the image of the optimistic technocrat. Unlike Romney, he's not saddled with having created Obamacare, nor is he known for Romney's opportunistic position-switching. And some of Huntsman's positions include (limited!) support for cap-and-trade policies and civil unions for the LGBT community. Yes, you read that right: as the governor of Utah and a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, Huntsman supported civil unions.

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Yesterday, authorities released Lynwood police officer Brian Dorian from custody and said they will resume their search today for the so-called "honeybee gunman" after determining he did not kill a man and wound two others in a shooting spree along the Illinois-Indiana border. (see here for the original story). After the shootings, police released a sketch of the suspect and described him as a white heavyset man dressed in a green windbreaker and a baseball cap, driving a light-colored late-90s model Chevy Cheyenne pick-up truck.

Mr. Dorian had been arrested on two bases. First, Dorian drove a truck similar to that described. He had been stopped driving it, but after flashing his badge, he was released without his truck being searched. The traffic stop ended up being crucial for prosecutors when they decided to charge Dorian with one of the shootings -- the fatal attack on Rolando Alonso, 45, a construction worker who was randomly gunned down while rehabbing a home, and Alonso's coworker Josh Garza, 19, who was shot above his right eye and survived, although the bullet remains lodged in the back of his brain and he is unable to communicate except with hand gestures. A third construction worker, also 19, escaped unharmed and identified Dorian after being shown an 8-year-old driver's license photograph of the officer. The same construction worker later also identified Mr. Dorian in a line-up.

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Over the past few years, I've had the pleasure of giving many presentations to high school and college students. Every time I've given these talks there's always a teacher or faculty member in attendance who at some point asks me to share some general advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. That's a hard question to answer without sounding breathtakingly obvious, but it has caused me to think a lot about that question. Ultimately, I've decided that the most relevant and generalizable piece of advice I can give to people is to notice what excites you.

I know, not exactly Aristotelian, but I actually think we're not by and large programmed to notice our ideas and inspirations as they pass us by. We're actually programmed to do quite the opposite. We're trained to pick a goal from a set of pre-defined options and then avoid distractions that might divert us from that goal. We learn how to follow curricula, prepare for tests, choose and complete majors, apply for jobs, climb professional ladders, etc. - the better we are at following the trail, the more rewarding the trail becomes. And that's fine. That's a very good way of life. But this mode is so intrinsic that we're not really even aware that we're doing it and I think we miss opportunities to take a shot at something that might be a more natural fit for us -- something not on the menu.

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There are times when I wonder what it might have been like to have lived through some of the most egregious moral failures of our history. What would I say to my grandchildren when they asked me about America under Jim Crow, or the days before women's suffrage, or indeed any era in which an institutional fact of our national life would in hindsight be exposed as a brazen and incontrovertible injustice? Had I been there, living it, would I have felt that something wasn't right? Would a sinister normal have seemed somehow acceptable? I wonder, because I only have this era to live in, and here I am, and something feels terribly wrong.

When I heard Newt Gingrich chide the president recently for what he described (borrowing a term from the imbecilic conspiracist Dinesh D'Souza) as "Kenyan, anticolonial behavior," my first thought was that it sounded exactly like something a racist person might say. Gingrich, fresh from the set of his recent documentary detailing the impending Islamic attack on America, is arguably the most successful Republican politician of the last twenty years. He is also an unapologetic parasite on our great national conversation, the note-perfect embodiment of the malignant tumor on political discourse his party has opted to become since the election of President Obama.

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This weekend, I enlisted my most stylish friend, Amanda, to help me Stacy & Clinton my closet. My instructions for Amanda were simple: Be ruthless and purge my wardrobe of any outdated, ill-fitting or just plain ugly sartorial sins. The fact was, I owned button-downs I hadn't worn for six years (when I last worked in a business-casual office that demanded something other than yoga pants and Hello Kitty slippers), as well as mini skirts I used to tart around in during my early 20s but would truthfully work better as Swiffer pads today.

Oh, did we purge. We purged like we haven't purged since our sorority days, when breakfast was a Snackwells vanilla crème sandwich cookie, lunch/dinner was peanut butter frozen yogurt topped with Golden Grahams and dessert was four Long Island iced Teas. GONE! was the lilac ribbed sweater with silver neck buckle that I once loved for how it made my small Bs look more like small Cs. GONE! were my brown plaid pants that I used to consider so hip and funky but now look like something my grandpa's gold buddies might rock on the front nine (Morty, however, would never be caught dead in them -- he prefers more of a Mafioso look, complete with black mock turtle neck, black blazer and camel slacks.) GONE! was the black long-sleeved top from Express circa 2003 with black ribbons cross-crossing its open back in a slightly fetishy manner.

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Two earth-shaking events have dominated the headlines lately. First, the riots and rebellions in the Arab world, starting with Tunisia, spreading to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and now, unrest growing in Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- man-made disasters. Second, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan -- catastrophes of nature. Both have claimed a tremendous death toll. In Japan alone, more than 11,000 deaths have been confirmed so far; the new estimated total has been placed at 30,000 or more. There is no accurate count of Arab protesters and loyalists killed, but hundreds of thousands of casualties are at risk for massive slaughter on both sides.

Ironically and metaphorically, both calamities may have emanated from cumulative volcanic eruptions culminating in violent eruptions. The suppressed anger of the oppressed people in the Arab countries finally exploded with rage and rebellion spurred on to revolt by the innate demand for individual freedom and liberty, as in the case of the Hebrew slaves under Pharaoh Ramses II 3,041 years ago. In Japan, some theorize that the initial cause of the tectonic plate shift that resulted in the severe earthquake that, in turn, churned the ocean into a powerful tsunami that shook the nuclear reactors that spewed streams of radiation steam that polluted the water and food supplies was the underground lava of a rumbling volcano. The burning question is were these isolated incidents or links in a chain that caused one cataclysm after another?

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Does it ever feel to you, after you're separated or divorced, that there are two parallel towns you live in? There's the one you lived in when you were married, peopled with the couples you hung out with, and if you have kids, populated also with the parents of your kids' friends, possibly (in some egregious cases) in-laws... There was a whole teeming population of people many of whom- when you got divorced, got wiped off the map. And then, Alice In Wonderland-like, you suddenly found yourself in a whole other place, you could call it Second City. Even if you stayed in the same apartment or house, it's different, your town has become a much less populous and thriving place. In fact, around this time of year, it can be downright depressing if you haven't at a minimum found someone new to repopulate your bed let alone your neighborhood.

Why is it that you need to move into this second, somewhat barren city? You kind of liked the one you were in, relationship discord notwithstanding. It's like punishment, banishment, for a crime you didn't commit! (on the other hand...) It can feel like a bad dream or a Twilight Zone episode where you are waving and shouting "helllloooooo" to everyone as they pass, the parents of your son's friends, the couple who were your movie buddies, but they don't see you, you are walking through your town like a ghost.

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The recent revelations about foreclosure processing -- that some banks may be repossessing the homes of families improperly -- has rightly outraged the American people. The notion that many of the very same institutions that helped cause this housing crisis may well be making it worse is not only frustrating -- it's shameful.

No one should lose their home as a result of a bank mistake. No one. That is why the Obama Administration has a comprehensive review of the situation underway and will respond with the full force of the law where problems are found. The Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force that President Obama established last November has made this issue priority number one. Bringing together more than 20 federal agencies, 94 US Attorney's Offices and dozens of state and local partners to form the broadest coalition of law enforcement, investigatory and regulatory agencies ever assembled to combat fraud, the Task Force is examining this issue and the Attorney General has said publicly that if it finds any wrongdoing the members of the task force will take the appropriate action. The Federal Housing Administration and Federal Housing Finance Agency have launched reviews to make sure servicers are in full compliance with the law. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has directed seven of the nation's largest servicers to review their foreclosure processes, fix the processing problems and determine whether there is specific harm that has been caused in individual cases.

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I have a defined benefit pension, a 401K and a paid-off mortgage. I keep a calendar to track my appointments and on it we plan our vacations and trips to see my aging mother. I got a sound education, thanks to my parents' foresight, and have had good jobs and a steadily advancing amount of both responsibility and compensation. I set aside money each month for life's uncertainties. My credit cards have a zero balance at the end of each payment period. I am an incredibly fortunate man, because fortune has indeed been kind to me.

People of a more adventurous bent might consider my life prosaic. In truth, and on balance, I have lived it more in prose than poetry. But every life has poetic moments, and I have been fortunate to have those too. My wife, my children and grandchildren, our three dogs, the surprise of each year's spring, fireflies filling the trees on a summer night, and the beauty of light as it surges through my completed stained glass panels have all created unplanned moments and have produced unending joys. Even the loss of my father, my wife's parents, close friends, our pets, and our children's divorces have brought the depth of feeling and the closeness of hearts touching that prose cannot capture, much as I have tried to make sense of these events through thinking about them. Perhaps it is because I think in prose as well.

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When I was a boy I stepped on a beehive at my uncle's farm. It was an honest mistake, but the consequences were grim. My sister, just behind me, was stung by tens of angry honeybees: on her legs, and arms, and stomach, even in her ears. The guilty culprit, I escaped with but a single sting on my little finger. As our panicked mother rushed to help sis with chunks of ice in soothing wet towels, I sat on the grass and found the bee whose sting remained launched in my pinky. It lay dead, it's entrails severed by the sting's penetration of my skin. Danna was crying out loud now, as much from pain as from fright. But all I can remember thinking to myself was: What a valiant bee it was, laying severed in the grass, who would sacrifice itself for the good of the hive.

Turns out Darwin had the same thought 120 years earlier, when he finally sat down to pen the Origin of Species. If nature, as the poet Tennyson had put it, was always "red in tooth and claw", how could one explain benevolence and sacrifice? The persistence over evolutionary time of behaviors that reduce fitness seemed an utter paradox if evolution was nothing but a game of survival of the fitness. This was Darwin's great riddle, and ever since biologists and economists, philosophers and psychologists have all been trying to crack it.

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Painter Al Agnew is not an inveterate shopper, but he spends a fair amount of time looking through merchandise catalogues. So do a lot of other wildlife artists; these days, it's part of the job description that tends not to get mentioned very much. Agnew and his wife, Jane, who live in St. Genevieve, Missouri, receive catalogues from 25 or 30 companies and look through them for images of fish, wolves and other wildlife on a variety of products (watches, coasters, t-shirts, for instance) that look like his own artwork. Too often, they find something.

The artist sells original oil paintings, specializing in pictures of fish, wolves and other wildlife, as well as prints based on those paintings, but somewhat more than half of Agnew's income is generated from licensing images to dozens of companies for use on their products. Other companies, however, choose to just take the images without paying a licensing fee to the artist. "Lots of things have been pilfered over the years," Agnew said. "On the average, there are half a dozen a year that we find." The loss of revenue to the artist for those six stolen images would be "$150,000 a year, had we not found it." (The artist has no idea how much money is lost for unlicensed images they do not find.) But, at least, they find that many, keeping his Washington, D.C.-based lawyer, James Silverberg, busy tracking down the copyright infringers and arranging payments.

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Larry Flynt has won. He was America's pioneer pornographer -- the man who fought against a still-Puritan nation all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to get vaginal close-ups into the grasp of every young man. This fight got him jailed. It got him shot. It got him rich. And at the end of it, the grandchildren of the people who demanded his arrest for launching Hustler magazine think nothing of clicking on XTube to view a million women splayed a million ways, or downloading their own sex tapes onto the site for everyone to see. He is the founding father of our new pornucopia. His brand of hardcore porn is everywhere, leaking into every email inbox. For him, it's a story of freedom triumphant. But does Flynt's story also show the costs -- and the casualties -- of the Dionysian frenzy he has helped unleash?

He extended our freedom by encouraging people to chuckle and masturbate over scenes of the most horrific unfreedom -- women being gang-raped, young girls being molested, "bitches" being shaved and slaughtered in concentration camps. One of his daughters says he molested her. Another of his daughters reportedly says he asked her to marry him. The cold Puritan morality of the Fifties badly needed to be relaxed -- but in Larry Flynt, did it melt down into a moral Chernobyl?

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The long drama of whether or not the US Congress would invest in international efforts to curb global warming pollution or gut these investments is finally over – at least for the rest of this fiscal year.  Last week President Obama signed into law a budget for the rest of this fiscal year (fiscal year 2011).  Investments in international climate activities fared alright.  The final bill would fund core international climate activities at $750-950 million, with other activities potentially adding to this total.  This is a continued investment in these critical programs, but still far away from the ultimate need.

As others have pointed out there is good, OK, and bad news.  This budget could have been much, much worse as the original House Republican passed bill would have gutted these critical investments by zeroing out some of the funding levels.  In addition, the House Republican version would have eliminated funding to help the best scientists in the world document and communicate the science behind carbon pollution (effectively having the house Republicans pretending global warming doesn't exist and muffling the scientists that would tell them otherwise).  Thankfully that provision wasn’t included.

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I'm in Cairo covering today's elections. I spent the day going from one polling station to another talking mostly to Muslim Brotherhood (MB) supporters and campaign workers. I'm not sure what to say. I apologize if I gave some people the impression that these elections were elections, in any real sense of the word. They were not. And I think it's worth underlining that point up front. As I wrote here yesterday, these elections are less important for what actually transpired, and more important for what they tell us about the critical players: the ruling National Democratic Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the United States.

Just two hours ago I talked to the MB representative responsible for a polling station in Medinat Nasr, where the country's largest opposition group is running a female candidate. He ran me through all the violations, one by one. It's the same story I heard over and over again all day today. In numerous districts, opposition representatives were not allowed in the voting room (only those with the NDP were). Which means that the ruling party could pretty much do as it willed. The world is watching, apparently, but not in the places that matter most. When the Ministry of Interior transports the ballot boxes in a couple hours, the world - let us be clear - will not be watching.

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I have been to plenty of fashion parties in Boston, but none have ever been as big, bold and beautiful as the one Thursday night at Liberty Hotel. I'd be lying if I said you didn't miss much. You missed a lot! Not only was it a night to celebrate BW's "birthday," but one of my favorite's, National Jean Company put on a fabulous fashion show with all the hottest fall trends. Army inspired garb, furs, booties, jeans, jeans and more jeans, and their take on how to stay chic and comfy this upcoming season.

Watching the models was one thing, but there was so much people watching going on, you could feel the stares shooting around like it was the Fourth of July. There were really some amazing people that came to support the event: Jeff Rudes, owner of J.Brand Jeans; Steve Simon, owner of National Jean Company with his two beautiful and always oh-so-chic daughters; Jill and Stacy Simon; Oscar Adames, celeb stylist; Kim Khazei from Channel 7 News; the Boldfacers crew; The Improper Bostonian; Milan Lucic and the some of his Boston Bruins teammates; and of course, the founders of Boutique Week, Olga Vidisheva and Polina Raygorodskaya.

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Having seen both The Lottery, creditably directed by Madeleine Sackler and Waiting for 'Superman', Davis Guggenheim's brilliantly produced but misleading take on the problems with the education "crisis" in this country, I have found one significant similarity between the two films besides the perception they share that charter schools are going in the right direction for dealing with the problems of low-income and minority student education. The other similarity is that almost all the young learners featured in these films whose "waiting" for the lottery is climaxed by finding out the "winners" and "losers," with mostly disappointing results, are not typical of many of the students in this country who are getting a second-rate education.

Those depicted in the movie, mostly Latino and African-American young learners, are bright and highly motivated; they have loving, caring parents who are dedicated to their children "making something of themselves." None of them have problems expressing themselves or understanding English and, with the exception of one white student, have any apparent learning disabilities. Added to that the fact that the parents are willing to participate with these children in a form of extended "reality video" with apparently no reservations about revealing their personal lives for a potential national audience and you have the "poster families" for movies attempting to find simple solutions to complex problems -- as one of the graphics states along with the film credits in Waiting for 'Superman'.

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When the financial crisis broke in September 2008, it was widely understood -- both in policy-making circles and in popular conversation -- that problems in the U.S. housing market were central to the unfolding events. But thereafter, the events themselves took center stage: and the problems of the housing sector, though not forgotten, slipped down the political agenda and off the popular radar. That was a mistake. Problems in the U.S. housing market remain central to our continuing difficulties -- problems experienced by people wanting to buy houses, and problems experienced by people who already own one. Economically and politically, a resolution of the U.S. housing crisis remains a key requirement for long term prosperity and, more immediately, for the continuation of a Democratic White House.

Economically the current recovery is slow in part because the housing sector remains sluggish. The housing sector remains sluggish because the inventory of unsold houses remains high; and the inventory of unsold houses remains high because the foreclosure crisis refuses to go away. Politically, Obama and the Democrats are losing popular support because unemployment and job insecurity are rife. Unemployment and job insecurity are rife because the economy remains sluggish; and the economy remains sluggish in part because there are still so many foreclosed homes on the market. People are losing their homes in record numbers in contemporary America, and they are doing so now on Obama's watch, not on Bush's.

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Once the set of numerous films, the "Henman House" has been listed with an asking price of $7.95 million. Built by Ed Niles (FAIA) in 1993, the residence sits on nearly seventeen acres of green Malibu lawns with unobstructed white-water views of the Pacific Ocean. The property grounds include a sixty-foot pool, a helipad that doubles as a driving range, and parking for twenty-five cars. The floors are fossilized limestone beneath twenty-two foot tall cathedral ceilings.There is a chef's kitchen with a black diamond fireplace and hidden panel cabinetry that opens to reveal a limestone patio and outdoor kitchen.

Owned by director Graham Henman and fashion stylist Paris Henman of Henman Guitars, this custom glass and steel home is one of the Ed Niles' many achievements. The architect has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Architectural Digest. In 2001, the University of Southern California presented him with their Distinguished Alumni Award. Angelenos may know Ed Niles from his "Salad Spinner" house in Beverly Hills, which sold for $9 million earlier this year. The architect lives and works in Malibu.

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The defense budget in back in the news -- the perennial harbinger of Spring like the first crocuses. This year's version of the ritualized passion play on Capitol Hill features Secretary Robert Gates' highly publicized proposal to trim military spending by $78 billion over the next five years. That would amount to roughly $15.5 billion per annum. A closer look reveals that the numbers refer only to the fixed Pentagon budget while excluding the 'off the books' outlays for the war/occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Conservative estimates of those costs (which assume a steady drawdown of forces and expenditures) pretty much match the projected $78 billion cuts. So, in truth, this heralded bold step to rein in defense spending is a bit of legerdemain. That's to be expected. These annual exercises usually are little more than stylized Kabuki.

There are obvious reasons for that. One is the powerful vested interests who resist making consequential changes. The other is intellectual. It is impossible to think seriously about defense budgets and Pentagon resource allocations without a clear idea of what we expect our military to do -- and why. In other words, the place to begin is with interests, needs and means. We don't do that. The production of strategic statements has become an art form for obfuscating half-baked ideas and flawed logic. Its main reference points, beyond an extrapolation of the status quo, are domestic politics and intra-governmental turf battles. This holds for budgetary plans as well.

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Teaching the physical dimensions of sustainability- the use of natural resources to build products and structures, waste management and the impact of humans on our plant's ecosystems- presents a challenge to the nation's business and public policy schools. Most of these schools focus on economics, finance, politics and management, but ignore science, engineering and architecture. While environmental scientists understand the need to study public policy and encourage their students to explore these fields, management and policy educators continue to ignore their students' need for greater scientific literacy. My view is that the physical dimensions of sustainability are now a critical factor and should be taught as a routine component of organizational management for both government and private organizations.

As an academic and a practitioner, I have spent my career alternating between a concern for environmental policy and for more effective organizational management. Until the last decade I kept these two areas of inquiry distinct. In developing two masters programs at Columbia over the past ten years, I have found it possible and necessary to combine the two areas. In 2002 I first combined environment and organizational management when I led a team that designed and taught a workshop in applied environmental management in our new one year Master of Public Administration Program in Environmental Science and Policy. Each year in the workshop course, we take an environmental bill or treaty that has been proposed, but not enacted, and simulate the start up of that program.

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After months of controversy, the French Senate recently adopted the law banning the burqa -- the enveloping outer garment worn by women to conceal their bodies from head to toe in some Islamic traditions -- in public spaces. Whether we like the burqa or not, we should recognize that French Parliament violated freedoms of expression, thought, conscience and religion -- a string of fundamental human rights that can no longer be taken for granted in France since the ban.

Both sets of principles are enshrined and protected by our modern constitutions and above all by the European Convention of Human Rights to which France and most European countries are signatory parties. In the United States, these freedoms are likewise recognized by the first amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion. These principles are among the pillars of our democratic societies in which anyone is free to practice (or not) the religion they choose or to express their ideas, irrespective of their absurdity or falsity, without prior approval of the authorities. In a law-abiding nation, the state must not judge the beliefs or opinions of its citizens based on reason, tradition or any other value. As with any other fundamental freedoms, if these civil liberties must be restricted then limitations should be both minimal -- in as much as the circumstances allow -- and strictly motivated by higher interests.

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With almost one in ten American workers currently unemployed, smart investment in infrastructure is an efficient way to create jobs right now. The job creation potential of infrastructure has been well-documented. Economists Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder, for example, explain in a report they coauthored that every dollar spent on infrastructure yields $1.57 in economic growth.

To generate the most jobs, every study has shown that it is important to prioritize investments in public transportation. Academic analysis concludes that public transit generates 31 percent more jobs per billion dollars invested than similar spending on highways. Models developed with the Federal Highway Administration likewise show transit investments generate 19 percent more jobs. Similarly, an analysis of U.S. Department of Transportation data shows that 2008 stimulus dollars spent on public transportation projects created up to twice as many jobs as highway spending for the same amount of money. The consistent finding is clear: to create jobs, invest in public transportation.

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For over a week I have been agonizing if I should publicly write about a movie premier I recently attended: Middle Men. You can imagine my trepidation writing about a movie which appears to be Studio 54 meets Boogie Nights and is about the creation of porn on the Internet. While the trailer certainly was designed to tantalize the masses by showing ample skin - to me this movie was as entertaining as it was thought provoking. Throughout the fast paced story of sex, drugs, money, and greed there were strong underlying themes of business savvy succeeding and positive messages that appeal to our inner-self help/hope mantras. The movie touched upon core issues that lurk behind closed doors of our lives: faithfulness, family dramas, personal struggle, and selling out.

I would have never thought that the main character, Jack, would have become a hero or even a guiding force as there is so much about him that one could find despicable (i.e. the man who made sellable sex on the Internet what it is today). However, Jack is not an adult film producer or even its advocate. He is a businessman, a leader, and a fixer. He was not in the adult film business, he was in the "fixing business." Jack's track record of fixes fledgling companies gives way to his mantra, "Let's focus on why we are here" -- a line that I have used daily since I have saw the movie.

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The ascension of Alvin Greene, a jobless man plucked out of obscurity and inexplicably hoisted as South Carolina's Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, continues to shock reporters and befuddle political pundits nationwide. Some people might balk at his dearth of credentials, lack of any political experience, his dishonorable discharge from the military, or simply his inability to string together a complete sentence. These people should shut up.

The opposition to Alvin Greene is endemic of an age-old discrimination rampant in America: jobism. Jobism is the unsubstantiated favor in a person's character based simply on the fact that he or she has a job. According to jobists, employed people somehow add value to society, and maintain a coherent, proper view of the world, arrogantly called a "work ethic." Some extremists even assert that people with jobs form the foundation of our civilization. Jobism--the belief that people who arrive at their office on time, and proceed to work steadily for fifty hours a week, are somehow more responsible than those who do not--is both myopic and repugnant. Unfortunately, these jobists fail to understand that we are still finishing our novel and need some space because are quitting smoking again. It is stereotypes like these that have pervaded American culture since its inception. It is stereotypes like these that have kept men like Alvin Greene out of the Senate...until now.

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Lauded architect Raphael Soriano's 1939 'Gogol House,' located in the Franklin Hills area of Los Feliz, is on the market. The three bedroom, three bath home is one of only twelve standing and intact structures built by Soriano, making it a precious piece of Los Angeles architectural history. Soriano helped to define the mid-century modern style while building dozens of homes in LA during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, according to the Society of Architectural Historians. While wildfires, earthquakes, demolitions, and unfortunate renovations have either destroyed or marred many of the architect's works, his legacy remains. Soriano studied under famous architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, and eventually taught at USC. In 1961 he became a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He was an early advocate of the use of modular prefabricated steel and aluminum structures in residential design, and capitalized on Southern California's booming postwar steel and aerospace industries, reports The Architectural Estates.

The Gogol House, built for surgeon Louis J. Gogol and his wife, has been termed "the purest example of Soriano's early work," according to Deasy/Penner & Partners, who is listing the property. The 2,779 square-foot house features a 2,000 square-foot rooftop deck. This sleek example of mid-century LA architecture is priced at $1,195,000.

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If there is a goddess of animals, it's my mother. She has such a reputation for helping animals in despair that people are constantly bringing her homeless cats, injured birds, rejected baby raccoons, all sorts of needy animals. She takes them into her country house and nurses them back to health. One morning when Mom went to get the mail, she found a dog tied to the mailbox with a note that said, "Please take care of me." Of course she took him in. Mom treats all animals like this.

In the winter, when the field mice get tired of the cold, they move inside. Naturally, the mice choose a warm, provisionally abundant place to live in: the kitchen. They find the cabinets most pleasant. As all country-house dwellers know, you must curb the mice problem before it gets out of hand. The kitchen mice spread the word to all their friends, and soon enough you've got the whole forest living in your kitchen cabinets. But, Mom has prohibited the use of traditional spring-loaded mousetraps. Instead, she uses live traps, baited with Brie cheese. She apologizes profusely to each one as she catches him. When the mouse is finished dining on the cheese, Mom takes the cage and puts it into the Cadillac and the mouse gets his luxury, chauffeured trip five miles down the road to a farmer's field. Once Mom sets the mouse free, she drives back home to catch the next one.

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Some revolutions start with a whimper barely noticed. On April 25, 1953, a short paper written by two relatively obscure scientists was published in the British journal Nature. That article by James Watson and Francis Crick described the double helical structure of DNA. The authors famously ended their paper with the classically understated conclusion that the structure they elucidated "suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." The quest to understand DNA's structure was a bit messy, and some would say achieved with dirty play; but no matter the process, with that article a revolution was born, one that still reverberates today.

We may look back 50 years hence and draw a similar conclusion about a brief news article published in the April 2011 issue of Science, the American counterpart to Nature. The short review mentions a presentation given at this year's American Chemical Society annual meeting in which chemist Daniel Nocera explains the results of his team's research over the past three years. (The paper describing this latest work has not yet been published; the team is in the process of patenting their discovery). What Nocera and his team did, barely noticed, was create an "artificial leaf" that could revolutionize our quest for renewable energy much as the Watson and Crick paper revolutionized the field of biology.

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As an aging beauty, well, aging anyway, I am forever on the prowl for amazing moisturizers. My mother taught me at an early age to slather on the moisturizer. She was a Ponds Cold Cream and Helena Rubinstein addict. I guess my tendency for addictions comes from her. I have spent the last 30 years going from one moisturizer to another, since Helena Rubinstein went out of business, and left to my own devices. Until last year, I had been using Queen Helene Grape Seed Extract Skin Firming Cream, until that was taken off the market. I snapped up every last jar of Queen Helene from remote retailers and have been nervous about running out, not having found a replacement. Until now.

I was recently in Beverly Hills and ducked into a weird little, dark store that turned out to be Mickey Fine's Annex on Bedford. Mickey Fine is the pharmacist to the stars and who knew he had an annex, or needed one. Anyway, I asked for their best moisturizer and they handed me Egyptian Magic. This on the very day that the Egyptians rid Hosni Mubarak of his duties. I thought surely the Egyptians had magic all around them. After all, they had Cleopatra in their arsenal of fierceness. And any money bet that Mickey Fine fills all of Elizabeth Taylor's prescriptions.

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