Liz Langley

It’s kind of funny that New Years is the resolution holiday when the greatest rehab story ever told happens a week before during Christmas. If there’s a bad habit you’re trying to break or a good one you’re trying to acquire (and if there’s just one you’re ahead of me) flip the calendar back to the week of December 25 and review a A Christmas Carol , which Charles Dickens wrote in 1843 because he needed the cash. A Christmas Carol is usually billed as a story of “redemption” which is a lovelier word than rehab but both just mean reclamation of one’s own life. And that’s what resolutions are made of. Scrooge’s addiction is clearly money, addiction here being defined as a fundamentalism about anything, whether it’s booze, sex, religion or “ Twilight .” It differs from a passion in that passion – for your work, your partner, for music or anything else –brings satisfaction at the end of the day. You might be consumed by it but in the end it’s not just a hiding place, whic

       When I first read about the Hot Mormon Muffins calendar of Mormon pin-ups in Details online I was as skeptical of the project as I am of religion in general (if you haven’t seen the South Park episode about Mormons you owe it to yourself, btw). But the more I read about Chad Hardy, specifically about his desire to break Mormon stereotypes, i.e., to let the world know that not all Mormons are anti-gay marriage, the more interesting the whole shebang became.        I got the opportunity to interview Chad for Alternet the day before Thanksgiving and spent two hours on the phone with him – that’s more than I often get to spend talking to people I actually know. He was engaging, funny and philosophical and hopefully that’s reflected in the resulting piece Latter Day Hotties: An interview with 'Mormons Exposed' founder Chad Hardy .      And if you need some incentive to check it out, here’s Sister Farr with some muffin tips. Enjoy!

We all know all about thinking positive, but there's an aspect of that dogma which, to me, is the emotional equivalent of airbrushing models to inhuman beauty standards: no one  can be that hap-hap-happy all the time, just like most of us can't be that tall, skinny or nicely dressed all the time.      Still, most of us, when confronted by a sad situation, instinctively want to pipe up "Look on the bright side!" and get our friends, who could have just gotten a pink slip, a heart break or a bad diagnosis, to feel better. Keying off of Barbara Ehrenreich's recent book "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America," I interviewed four authors, including Christina Nehring, Dr. John Sharp, Dr. Charles Sophy (from Celebrity Rehab)  and Sheri Winston about what is  that best way to receive bad news from a friend:  Don't Put on a Happy Face: Why Fake Optimism is the Worst Way to Deal With Bad News . I hope everyon

        Steve Martin once said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” and I kind of feel the same way about sex. Some music you just have to hear, some dishes you just have to taste and some intimacies you can’t describe. Words are as insufficient to convey them as a Ford Fiesta would be to convey the Pieta .        If you have ever tried to write sex scenes you know how tough this is. I’m not talking about the digital mash notes we all occasionally fire off to some lucky winner, I’m talking about using words to do the jobs hands, lips and a couple of boxes of wine are usually employed to do. Sex scenes are murder to write convincingly. I write about sex every day but mainly from a removed, observational, my-isn’t-that-interesting POV, like Bill Bryson writing about the Australian box jellyfish . Much easier to put it to someone in person than on paper.        Some people, god love them, will try, though. Some will end up with book contracts. Some won’t. And