By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
HOUSTON — Annise Parker does not talk much about her sexual orientation on the campaign trail. She prefers to focus on issues like drainage and balancing the budget.
But it has escaped no one’s notice here in the nation’s fourth-largest city that Ms. Parker, the current city controller known for her low-key [...]

by Lama Surya Das

The TAO OF TWITTER is—like a standup comedian’s good one liner, haiku poetry, and the old fashioned singing telegram—rich with the magical power and incandescent immediacy of nowness, which is part and parcel of the power of Tao. People are genuinely feeling this invisible yet palpable pulse, its heartbeat the ambient chatter [...]

By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
One night during my training, long after all the other doctors had fled the hospital, I found a senior surgeon still on the wards working on a patient note. He was a surgeon with extraordinary skill, a doctor of few words whose folksy quips had become the stuff of department legend. [...]

By TARA PARKER-POPE
Does running a marathon push the body further than it is meant to go?
The conventional wisdom is that distance running leads to debilitating wear and tear, especially on the joints. But that hasn’t stopped runners from flocking to starting lines in record numbers.
Last year in the United States, 425,000 marathoners crossed the finish [...]

This week with speak with the author of Saltwater Buddha, Jaimal Yogis.  Jaimal, a Zen surfer and journalist, wrote Saltwater Buddha to chronicle his late teens and early 20’s as he learned to surf and delved into Zen.  He shares with us some of the highlights from this time of his life, and also shares [...]