Meditating Warriors

By Belleruth Naparstek, for The Huffington Post 

A couple of weeks ago, I was in San Antonio to do resilience training with Army hospital professionals. My job was to demonstrate why guided imagery audios were an effective, portable, user-friendly, idiot-proof tool for managing stress and preventing burnout for health providers, wounded warriors and veterans alike.

It was an impressive group of health care professionals we were training. Some had backgrounds straight out of health and mental health, while others came from the combat side -- former special ops, rangers, snipers, bomb dismantlers and so on. Some straddled both worlds. They came from as far away as Korea and Germany, and as close by as Fort Sam Houston, and every place in between. They'd seen a lot of seriously nasty stuff.

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The Rise Of The Power Vegan

By Joel Stein, in Business Week

It used to be easy for moguls to flaunt their power. All they had to do was renovate the chalet in St. Moritz, buy the latest Gulfstream jet, lay off 5,000 employees, or marry a much younger Asian woman. By now, though, they've used up all the easy ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of us—which may be why a growing number of America's most powerful bosses have become vegan. Steve Wynn, Mort Zuckerman, Russell Simmons, and Bill Clinton are now using tempeh to assert their superiority. As are Ford Executive Chairman of the Board Bill Ford, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, venture capitalist Joi Ito, Whole Foods Market Chief Executive Officer John Mackey, and Mike Tyson. Yes, Mike Tyson, a man who once chewed on human ear, is now vegan. His dietary habit isn't nearly as impressive as that of Alec Baldwin, though, who has found a way to be both vegan and fat at the same time. 

President (and former leader of the gourmand world) Clinton with daughter, Chelsea

It shouldn't be surprising that so many CEOs are shunning meat, dairy, and eggs: It's an exclusive club. Only 1 percent of the U.S. population is vegan, partly because veganism isn't cheap: The cost comes from the value of specialty products made by speciality companies with cloying names (tofurkey, anyone?). Vegans also have to be powerful enough to even know what veganism is.

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Many Little Piggies, Handled With Care

by Christian L. Wright for The New York Times

IN 1993, Russ Kremer was driving his new boar from a pen to the sows on his farm in Osage County, Mo. The boar became aggressive while passing another boar and swung his head around abruptly, puncturing Mr. Kremer's knee with his tusk. Mr. Kremer, a fifth-generation pig farmer, said he didn't think much of it until his leg swelled to twice its normal size.

He checked into the hospital and "they gave me all kinds of antibiotics," Mr. Kremer said, but the infection was resistant to them. The doctors finally determined that the cause was a mutated form of staphylococcal bacteria. Mr. Kremer recovered after a course of the most powerful antibiotic, and then he traced the history of the boar that he had bought from a farmer in Kansas.

"The original farmer had fed penicillin daily to his hogs to keep in check a staph problem that he had," said Mr. Kremer, who studied genetics at the University of Missouri and had, until then, been hog farming in a conventional, intense-production style. The experience awoke him to the fact of resistance to antibiotics in livestock and the significant health risk it posed to humans. "I went cold turkey," he said.

Read the story in The Times.

Thanksgiving At An Oasis of Calm: Nepenthe, Big Sur

by Romney Steele for Saveur.com

I've always cherished Thanksgivings at Nepenthe, my grandparents' storied restaurant in Big Sur, California. My mother's parents, Bill and Lolly Fassett, opened Nepenthe in 1949 on a cliffside property they'd fallen in love with and then purchased from its owners, Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles.The view from a table at Nepenthe

My grandfather, the child of an astrologer, and my grandmother, whose grandparents founded the artists' colony of Carmel, fit right into Big Sur's bohemian culture. They envisioned Nepenthe—a Greek word for an elixir that erases grief—as a place where people could forget their worldly cares and draw inspiration from the ocean views, the architecture (the restaurant was built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright), the guests (painters, poets, vagabonds, and a few celebrities, like the writer Henry Miller), and, of course, the food. The restaurant became known for delicious, whimsically named dishes like the Phoenix Special, a steak slicked with Gorgonzola—caramelized onion butter, and the Ambrosia Burger, slathered in zesty mayonnaise.

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Elizabeth L. Sturz, Salvaged Troubled Lives, Dies at 93

An inspiring obituary by Douglas Martin for The New York Times

Elizabeth L. Sturz, who started and ran renowned programs to help troubled youths and people suffering from both mental illness and drug addiction — all to further her goal “to be of use” — died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 93.

The cause was pneumonia, her family said.

Mrs. Sturz had lived a full life before she plunged into the urban wasteland of the South Bronx in 1968. She had been a poet, circus acrobat, novelist, soap opera writer, ghostwriter forMadame Chiang Kai-shek and wife of Alan Lomax, the famous folklorist.

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