Stuck

A creepy feeling grips me as I watch the "Secret to Riches," a video affiliated with the megabestselling book The Secret. The video has racked up over two million views. It's like primitive spellcasting and sci-fi rolled into one. It's wishful thinking gone electronic. And even though I do believe in magic and in the power of positive thinking, I squirm as I read across the screen: "I am a money magnet... I have more riches than King Solomon's mines.... There is more money being printed for me right now." Obligingly, images flash past of money being printed and pouring out of the sky. Symphonic music roars. Read More

Whatever ceremonies the rest of us dodge for our own flesh and blood, whatever memorial prayers we never learn to say and whatever bouquets we do not buy, whatever epitaphs we do not write -- these grieving fans do. You see them weeping on TV. They are not faking it, not all of them.  Read More

Two of the people closest to me -- one a friend, the other a relative -- inhabit private realms of raging misery in which one of them hears spies prowling on her rooftop every night, the other slaps his own face while glaring into the mirror. Everyone else in their lives has given up on them and left: abandoned them, you might venture to say. I'm probably handling our relationships all wrong: I listen. I advise, although they never take my advice. But is this better than just walking away? Read More

These last few months, far from her London home, the enormously talented musician has been on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where Universal Records hopes she'll dry out, write, and record. Instead, she drinks. At resorts, paparazzi snap her crawling across bar floors, begging tourists for sips after bartenders refuse to serve her. The record company has spent nearly $1 million on Winehouse's idyll thus far, but she has neither written nor recorded anything of note. She has cancelled concert dates. For all its tragedy, this is a captivating glimpse into the drama of addiction -- captivating because it's larger-than-life, illuminating the question of incentive, i.e.: What would it take to quit? Read More