How do you make sense of the senseless? As soon as I logged-on to The Washington Post Saturday morning, I stared in disbelief at a headline reporting that the latest school shooting had occurred just twenty minutes from where I live. From late Friday night to Monday morning, our small community continues to be shaken by the fact that we have joined...

In search of ratings gold, television networks always seem willing to go to most any length to degrade the state of the medium; (I still can’t get past NBC’s cable-owned Bravo’s Real Housewives series); but television news shows are supposed to be different, right? Just when you think bad programming cannot get any worse, MSNBC jumps the shark … big time! On Monday,...

On Monday, Columbia University announced the 2014 recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s most prestigious honor. Chris Hamby of The Center for Public Integrity – a Washington, DC-based non-profit – was awarded a Pulitzer for his report, Breathless and Burdened, on “how some lawyers and doctors rigged a system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease, resulting...

On Monday April 14, it was announced that the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspapers shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest award, in the area of public service for their reporting on the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program. However, the documents supplied to both the Post and Guardian were leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Last June,...

It was the authority of an Ohio minister who first brought the power of positive thinking to the national stage. Norman Vincent Peale’s landmark book, The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952, remained on The New York Times bestseller list for a staggering 186 consecutive weeks. While much of the philosophy lacked named sources and direct evidence, Peale claimed his work was...

When it comes to privacy and your personal information, the NSA is not the organization we need to worry about the most, data brokers are. As I discussed on Monday, data brokers are busy compiling detailed profiles not only of your likes and dislikes, but considerably more personal information than the NSA, including but not limited to, any diseases you...

Think the National Security Agency (NSA) is the greatest threat to American’s privacy? Think again. The number of data brokers – companies that collect, categorize and sell information about each of us – is mindboggling. The following story by CBS News 60 Minutes (Mar. 9) got my attention when I noticed that two of the sample sites they were browsing – The...

There’s a strange thing about real life stories that make them more compelling than fiction. The random chances of life intrude in such a way that we are left to make sense out of a cloud of unanswerable questions. Such has been the case with Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. In 10 days we have gone from initial reports of massive...

Last year, NBC News reported that America’s teenagers scoredbelow the international average in math, and only average in science based on a report from a 2012 Program for International Student Assessment. Fortunately, 1,700 science students from around the country did not have time to pay much attention to the study. Each year since 1998, Intel, the computer chip corporation sponsors the Intel Science...

According to a survey conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind, “What you know depends on what you watch.” “NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows,” the report says, “are the most informative news outlets, while exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC, has a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge.” This follow-up report, completed in May, 2012, confirms the initial findings from a...