Listen Watch One thing stayed with me after my conversation with Joy Jordan Lake. She opened up to me about how a fear of failure as a writer prevented her from fully embracing it as a career. Don’t get me wrong, most authors have a challenging time making ends meet...
Listen Watch Prior to meeting Nobel Prize winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah a few weeks ago, the only thing I knew about his home country of Zanzibar was that Freddie Mercury was born there and Billy Joel wrote a song by that name, though I’m pretty sure it was about a...
Listen Watch Do you wonder why bad things always seem to happen to good people? Do you want to know how to overcome adversity and become successful despite terrible odds? Would you like to know what a parkway on Long Island has to do with two evil dictators? Well,...
Listen Watch Many years ago I was taking guitar lessons with a great teacher named Ken Volpe, or Master Ken as I liked to call him. When shooting the breeze over a song one day, I said to him, “I don’t like the solo. I would do something differently.” He said, “Oh...
Listen Watch When I was eighteen, I was very clear on what I wanted to be when I grew up—a psychologist. Two people are to blame for my fascination in this social science; Mr. Michael Roper, who taught Intro to Psychology at my high school and Thomas Harris, who wrote...
Listen Watch I’ll admit it, I became a subscriber to Sirius XM when Howard Stern left terrestrial radio for satellite. One evening, though, on a long drive from Boston to Connecticut, I came across The Catholic Channel and listened to a program called The Busted Halo...