Last week I heard on BBC radio that the National Health Service in England is instructing doctors to prescribe self-help books. The radio presenter seemed a little aghast at this idea and pressed a doctor by asking something along the lines of, “So you’re saying that you think that people will respond well to a doctor basically telling them that...
My father casts a shifting shadow. It has been 7 years since he was hit by a car; and his influence on my thoughts and actions continues to evolve. My oldest daughter was still three years old when he died, and my youngest was in utero, 3 months from birth. I think about him as a father, my father, as...
I think a lot about the unconscious frames that we view the world through. In fact I would even say that my frame is a “frame skeptical frame”, which tends to slow me down quite a bit. However, most people ignore the frames and just “go with the flow”, because asking questions can be difficult. Two articles I saw today...
I am 43 years old. I came of age at a time when photographers developed their own film and, for the most part, printed their own pictures. There were no digital cameras and the internet was not the internet. It is almost hard to remember a time when people weren't instagramming pictures of every meal to 10,000 followers, but 20...
Pause for a moment and think about how you think about healthcare. Do you trust doctors in white coats more than doctors who dress more casually. When you hear the word "alternative practitioner," do you think of quacks or healers? Do you think about how your emotions affect your health? For the most part, we go through life without paying attention...
As of Monday, October 8th, 2012 at least 8 people in the United States have died, and another 105 were struck with meningitis, after receiving an epidural steroid injection intended to treat chronic back pain. The tragic aspect is not simply that these people have died, but instead that the data that exists concerning steroid injections shows that they don't...
Battle for Brooklyn airs on TV in Australia next week and should be hitting the US airwaves this fall. It's been over a year since the film was first run on screen and as such it’s a good time to write an update about where things stand with the Atlantic Yards project and the film. After launching it at Hot...
About six months ago, I happened upon a Jonah Lehrer article in Wired. The article starts out with a couple of paragraphs about a drug company whose stock shot up because they had developed a drug that stopped the body from producing the "bad fat". This was pretty important to the drug company as their drug Lipitor (which stopped the...
Recently, an ode to video stores went somewhat viral on facebook. Kim's video was an amazing resource for finding out about films in the late 80's and early 90's. For me though, it was the record stores and book stores that had a greater impact. When I moved to NY, I mostly cared about music and photography. I hit the record...
Last week I heard on BBC radio that the National Health Service in England is instructing doctors to prescribe self-help books. The radio presenter seemed a little aghast at this idea and pressed a doctor by asking something along the lines of, “So you’re saying that you think that people will respond well to a doctor basically telling them that...
As I travel with our film, "Battle for Brooklyn", I also discuss our current ongoing project "Story of Pain". At a recent screening in San Jose I mentioned the film and the fact that it focuses on Dr. John E. Sarno. David Lang, a silent film enthusiast from Santa Rosa, CA approached me after the film to let me know...
On Thursday at Brooklyn Technical HS, the Panel for Educational Policy planned to close 23 public schools citywide. I had just returned from a trip on Thursday and didn't feel that I had the energy to go; I had been to several last year and found that they were a sham public meeting like so many I had been to...