In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush urged Americans not to be intimidated by the “war on terror,” but to get back to our lives of shopping, flying and “business as usual.” The dubious wisdom of this directive aside, it seems to me that the average American consumer doesn’t need much encouragement. Take our annual “Black Friday” extravaganza. Who is fueling whose agenda? In 2014, store profits peaked around $50.9 billion –an 11 percent dip from the previous year. Last year’s profits dipped... Read more

“Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.” ~ Napoleon Hill In a digital age of Smartphone texting and Twittering sound bytes, do we have the time to pause—even for a nanosecond—to consider the possible repercussions of what we say? Hardly. So how do we express the essential, dispense with the fluff, and ultimately leave all interlocutors in the thread unharmed and whole? Here’s what... Read more

I’m at the library working on my book. In walks a teenage friend of mine. On seeing me, she immediately pulls a book off the shelves and announces, “You need to read this.” So the following week, on her recommendation, I read Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher. I haven’t read a teenage novel since I was . . . a teenager; but the premise alone on this one hooked me: Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package... Read more

Life for so many is a perpetual whirligig of sensory excitement and adventure; of constant motion, momentum, and mobility as one squeezes all that one can out of the world’s cornucopia of delights.  While there is something to be said for St. Irenaeus of Lyon’s “The Glory of God is a human being fully alive”, I believe that the Essence of God Consciousness is to be found in silence and stillness: in a word – meditation. I took my first serious plunge into... Read more

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the liturgical season of Lent, a penitential period of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving for Christians worldwide. Fasting also happens to be one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and is practiced faithfully by Muslims during Ramadan – a period lasting up to 354 days a year. So what’s the deal with fasting? Does it make us holier, thinner, or grumpier? Possibly all three depending on our disposition. However, I believe the key to its sanctifying virtue is, not so... Read more

Google claims its new quantum computer –  the D-Wave 2x system – will leave its competitors in the dust. But there may not be any competitors for a while if Google’s “Ace of Spades” newbie performs as they predict. According to Hartmut Neven, head of its Quantum Al Lab, this baby can run: “We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1,000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10 to the power of 8 times faster than... Read more