I’m reading a book that speaks to me as a journalist, Brian Grazer’s 2015 release “A Curious Mind: The Secret To A Bigger Life.” In it, the 64-year-old Emmy-winning movie producer recounts his practice of conducting “curiosity conversations” twice a month for the past three decades to fill up his knowledge reserve and walk […]

The mention of booze generates a look of horror among many of the non-drinkers living and working alongside Michael P. Foley in Waco, Texas, where the Catholic dad teaches at a dry Baptist college. There’s a “skittishness,” he says. So Michael was prepared to raise eyebrows with his new book, “Drinking with the Saints: The […]

“The only essential equipment for seeing birds is a pair of eyes. Good ears are a help too.” The first edition of “Birds: A Guide to the Most Familiar American Birds” smells like an old missal and reads like a manual for living well — birding as a hobby, a lifestyle and a meditation. Its […]

Belinda Monahan has analyzed more than 100,000 animal bones in Armenia dating back from the Early Bronze Age (1,200 BC) to the Medieval period. For the 44-year-old archaeologist from New Jersey, the thrill never wears off. “When you look at a Stork’s lower-leg bone,” she says, “it’s about as long as my lower-leg bone. It’s […]

Grace Osterbauer was a 24-year-old bride-to-be when she took her first cake-decorating class, and the impulse compelling the Texas beauty to make that $35 investment remains today, now a 40-year-old mother of eight. “I wanted to make the Catholic events of our lives super special,” she said. Grace and her husband, Paul, are both frugal, […]

Looking back, the son that was born to Leopald and Anna Maria Mozart on a Tuesday evening in late January seemed to arrive with fully formed symphonies bound up in his tiny body, waiting for ink and instrument. At age 3, the toddler nicknamed Wolfgangerl was identifying thirds on the clavier and by 5, he […]

Lena Dunham is not done confessing. That’s the headline of The New York Times Magazine profile just published about the actress-turned-memoirist, and it couldn’t be more apt. Though I’ve never seen an episode of her highly rated, super-raunchy, nudity-filled HBO show “Girls,” I consider Lena something of a cultural case study, given how often she […]