Columnists

Imagine not being able to watch "Person of Interest," "The Good Wife," "NCIS," and other programs on CBS or Showtime. But satellite customers like me as well as cable customers may not be able to have uninterrupted access to the major four (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) because the 1992 Cable Act requires pay TV providers to get broadcaster consent to carry the station and, since there is no limit on what broadcasters can charge in retransmission fees, pay TV providers can either pay what is asked or lose access to these networks -- a black out. -more-

For the time being, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyio Erdogan—with the liberal use of brutal police tactics and massive amounts of tear gas that killed four people and injured more than 8,000— appears to have successfully crushed demonstrations aimed at blocking the demolition of Gezi Park in central Istanbul and has weathered a similar outbreak in the country’s capital, Ankara. -more-

When Barack Obama was elected President, many of us were hopeful that it signaled an end to widespread racism. We were naïve. George Zimmerman’s not-guilty verdict indicates how much work remains. -more-

Hillary Clinton will likely be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and the odds-on favorite to become the 45th President. Nonetheless, while over the last sixty years there’s been a lot of civil-rights progress in the US, women remain second-class citizens. Whatever happened to the women’s movement? -more-

Of the many negative stereotypes that exist about older adults, the most common is that we are forgetful, senile and prone to so-called "senior moments." In fact, research from the USC Davis School of Gerontology reveals that, while cognitive processes do indeed decline with age, simply reminding older adults about ageist ideas exacerbates their memory problems. It is an extension of the idea of "stereotype threat" — that when people are confronted with negative stereotypes about a group with which they identify, they tend to self-handicap and underperform. In so doing, they inadvertently confirm the negative stereotypes they were worried about in the first place. -more-

The world now knows that George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator, was acquitted of shooting and killing Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. The teen was walking inside a gated community in Sanford, Florida, where he and his father were visiting his father’s fiancée. -more-

Life is never perfect; it is often fraught with difficulty, and it refuses to conform to our wishes and our expectations. This seems true for all beings, yet truer if you are living with a severe mental illness. -more-