The Lodge at Woodloch Brought Me Back to Life

It didn’t really matter that in the past few months I’ve taken over a company, finished a book, and said the long, big good-bye to my mother. It didn’t really matter that it was my birthday and I was giving myself a present. I still felt sharp pangs of guilt as I said good-bye to my little darlings and headed for a spa in the Poconos.

These days any sign of excess is uncool, and it’s hard… more

Tags: Economy, lodge at woodloch, spa

The End of GDP: A New Economic Model Closer to Nature

I hate it when I have an idea, and then Nobel Prize-winning economists get all the credit for thinking of it first. That’s what happened last week when I read in the New York Times about Joseph E. Stiglitz and Amartya Sen (my all-time favorite economist) recommending that we do away with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the ultimate measure of the health of a country and its economy.

The truth is, recessions are fairly predictable. Since the founding of America, we’ve had one at… more

Tags: Economy, nature

Buy Local, Buy American

Last night I went into a Lowe’s for the first time. I needed to buy a cat door for the chicken coop I’m building (long story, I’ll save it for later!). I’d never been to Lowe’s before. It was fine. Big. It had that stinky chemical smell. I wouldn’t rush to go back for any reason. (If it’s hardware I need, I have two favorite stores that are locally owned, and so quirky and helpful I just love going to them.)

So while I was there, I thought I would pick up some knobs for a… more

The 5 Real Reasons American Health Care Is So Expensive and Ineffective

The debate is heating up over the future of health care in America, but this is a subject I’ve been thinking about for a long time. As a publisher in the health field, a new member of the board of a very large hospital (the Lehigh Valley Health Network), and a health “consumer” who has helped my mother navigate the system, I’m starting to understand where we have gone wrong. And we have gone wrong. Unless we address these five issues, we will never really fix the situation… more

Will People Ever Pay for News? Vote Yes or No!

It’s all Benjamin Franklin’s fault. He was the one who invented, in his first magazines and newspapers, the idea of using advertising to subsidize content. Not many people realize that even when they pay for the information in newspapers, magazines, or websites, they are only paying for part of the product. All those “annoying” ads are paying for people to write, create, and produce—and to support their families.

And here is the honest truth (I say this having been in the magazine… more