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Can Mindfulness Rewire the Brain to Cause Kindness, Compassion, and Ease?
The Dalai Lama issued neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison a challenge: instead of spending so much time studying conditions like fear, depression, and anxiety, why not apply your rigorous scientific methodology to studying the...
Wisconsin Film Festival Features Peter Anton in “Almost There” Documentary
One of the jewels of the Madison cultural scene is the Wisconsin Film Festival. This year’s 150 films are spread throughout seven theaters over a span of eight days. Run largely by the grace of a huge volunteer force (headed up by a relatively small paid staff),...
Unravelling Shakespeare
Last night I had the opportunity to attend a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, produced by the Strollers Theatre company which performs in the Bartell Theatre here in Madison, Wisconsin (thank you, Project Famous, for the complementary...
Heroes to Me: Ferguson Public Library
I got a kick out of the advertisements this week for the TNT show The Librarians, featuring young librarians as super heroes. While not as dramatic and absent the explosions, real life librarians are often truly the super heroes of our society. Case in...
An Interview with Ben Perreth of Making Lemonade with Ben Fame
Ben Perreth is an incredibly amazing young man. At age seven he survived a brain hemmorage, as chronicled by his mother Katherine Perreth in the must-read book, Making Lemonade with Ben: The Audacity to Cope. That singular event launched him and his family...
A Conversation with Katherine Perreth, Author of Making Lemonade with Ben
Earlier this spring I had the opportunity to meet an incredible woman, Katherine Perreth, and her even more incredible son Ben, at a writers conference. I can’t begin to describe what happened to Ben in just a few paragraphs, except to say that at age seven he had a...
Yoopers Get Recognition, eh…!
Whoohoo! We made it into the dictionary—the Miriam Webster Dictionary to be specific. Who are we? We are Da Yoopers! Natives and expats of the U.P., Michigan’s glorious Upper Peninsula. It turns out the Urban Dictionary has recognized us since 2005. “Yooper is...
A Hero in My Eyes: Shannon Watts, Founder of Moms Demand Action
I remember where I was when I first saw the “Breaking News” on my iPhone: there had been a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I was sitting in an elementary school classroom with a cadre of teachers—we were there to learn new...
Henry S. Miller’s 2014 Happiness Calendar
The 2014 Happiness Calendar below came to my email in-box as a free blog post to promote the book The Serious Pursuit of Happiness by Henry S. Miller, a motivational speaker and consultant. I did not write it. But I like the concept of a monthly focus...