Attention foodies: There's a new craze in Cuisine World, and it's going 180 degrees in the opposite direction from the much-publicized healthy-eating movement.

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We moderns seem determined to suppress all unhappiness with one exception: grief. The intense sadness following loss of a loved one still occupies a warm spot in our culture. We want that pain protected from the deadening analgesics of pharmaceuticals.

That explains the American Psychiatric Association's decision to retreat from a plan to categorize ordinary grief as an adjustment disorder. Some wanted to classify a response to significant loss — deep sadness, insomnia, ...

I think gay marriage is an incredibly boring subject; though, I do like to hear right-wingers say that it will bring the whole edifice of Western civilization crashing down. It's hard, these days, to find such messages of good cheer. I don't yearn for such a union, so I have no personal stake in the issue. Occasionally, my gay friends tell me they've got married. They never seem especially exuberant.

So the liberal progressives glory in Obama's ...

Veterans of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are now challenging the occupation of Chicago.

This week, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is holding the largest meeting in its 63-year history there. Protests and rallies will confront the two-day summit, facing off against a massive armed police and military presence. The NATO gathering has been designated a "National Special Security Event" by the Department of Homeland Security, empowering the U.S. ...

For honoring his conscience on the issue of marriage equality, President Obama earned angry rebukes from all quarters on the right, including the Uncle Toms of the Log Cabin Republicans, who said he was "a day late and a dollar short"; teenage mom Bristol Palin, who mocked him for invoking his daughters in changing "thousands of years of thinking about marriage"; and 50-year-old virgin Ann Coulter, often engaged but never wed, who called his decision "a sign of ...

The Victorian era gave birth to a very unpleasant custom called slumming. Parties of swells in London and New York would descend on impoverished neighborhoods as a form of entertainment. In addition to breaking up the tedium of their posh lives, the adventure made them feel superior.

A much updated version of slumming has been taking place in Manhattan, where Facebook is arranging its initial public offering. This time, though, it's the super-rich visitor, Facebook founder Mark ...

On the HBO series "Girls," Hannah asks her boss at a publishing house for a salary. The 24-year-old has been working as an unpaid intern for over a year, and her parents will no longer support her.

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Let's suppose that the blind Chinese dissident, Chen Guangcheng, remains spunky once he's settled in at New York University and gets some time during the summer to join an Occupy demonstration, along with his wife.

Here's what they might reasonably expect by way of treatment from the NYPD, if we are to believe — which I do — a report on new police strategies against protestors by David Graeber, anthropologist and creative force in the Occupy ...

The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.

Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington ...

The overnight rating for the Kentucky Derby telecast has slipped again, hitting a six-year low. This was despite NBC's best efforts to fill the hours with such celebrities as "Two and a Half Men" star Ashton Kutcher and Debra Messing from "Smash." Or was it because of them? A romantic 138-year tradition ...

Retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard was arrested in Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza in New York City last Tuesday night as he participated in the May 1 Occupy demonstrations. He and 15 other military veterans were taken into custody after they linked arms to hold the plaza against a police attempt to clear it. There were protesters behind them who, perhaps because of confusion, perhaps because of miscommunication or perhaps they were unwilling to risk ...

Drugs are cheap. Patent monopolies are expensive. These are simple facts that everyone should know but for some reason few do.

The point here is simple; the vast majority of drugs are cheap to produce. Chain drug stores sell hundreds of generic drugs for $5-$7 per prescription. They can do this profitably because few drugs require expensive chemicals or manufacturing processes.

However, many brand drugs sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per prescription. This is ...

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 13,338 Tuesday, its highest since December, 2007. The S&P 500 added 16 points. Wall Street will remember May 1 as a great day.

But most of these gains are going to the richest 10 percent of Americans who own 90 percent of the shares traded on Wall Street. And the lion’s share of the gains are going to the wealthiest 1 percent.

Shares are up because corporate profits are up, and profits are up largely because companies have figured ...

Those who saw mass migration from Mexico as a threat and those who did not all agreed on one thing: It was unstoppable without dramatic action by the federal authorities. They turned out to be wrong about that. The title of a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center, "Net Migration From Mexico Falls to Zero — and Perhaps Less," says it all.

So everyone buckle your seatbelts, if indeed more Mexicans are going back to Mexico than crossing into the United ...

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets ...

Are American lives cheaper than those of the Chinese? It's a question raised by Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, who has just published a compelling comparison between the way the Chinese dealt with one of their drug scandals — melamine in baby formula — and how the U.S. handled the Vioxx disaster.

In September 2004, Merck, one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies, issued a sudden recall of Vioxx, its anti-pain medication ...

What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew ...

Three targeted Americans: A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained—sometimes at gunpoint—and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent.

The intelligence official: William Binney worked for almost 40 ...

I went to Lille in northern France a few days before the first round of the French presidential election to attend a rally held by the socialist candidate Francois Hollande. It was a depressing experience. Thunderous music pulsated through the ugly and poorly heated Zenith convention hall a few blocks from the city center. The rhetoric was as empty and cliché-driven as an American ...

To quote "Adelaide's Lament" from "Guys and Dolls," "You can feed her all day with the vitamin A and the bromofizz/ But the medicine never gets anywhere near where the trouble is." That's the sense one gets from the recent tone-challenged courting of women voters.

On the Sunday talk shows, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called "ridiculous" Republican Mitt Romney's assertion that most of the jobs lost during the Obama ...