Last week playwright-actress-professor Anna Deavere Smith learned that she had won the Lillian Gish Prize, which is awarded “to a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” The New York Times’ announcement says Smith “burst onto the theater scene in the 1990’s with one-woman shows like ‘Fires in the Mirror’ (about the 1991 riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn) and ‘Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992’ (about violence in that city after the acquittal of police officers in connection with the beating of Rodney King)…” She is credited with creating a “new art form.” After in-depth research…
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The Key to Healthy & Happy Lives? The Answer Might Surprise You.
In his eye-opening book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), Malcolm Gladwell tells a cross between a fairy tale and a detective story about a town whose inhabitants enjoyed good health. A curious and diligent doctor figured out that it had little to do with the food they ate, or the exercise they did, or the doctors they went to. It had everything to do with how they treated each other. It sounds like one of the storybooks we used to read to Natalie that would begin something like this: In a town called Roseto, Pennsylvania the people stayed healthy. They lived long, happy lives. What…
