“Someone has to tell me why we keep allowing social media and our very lives as social creatures to be dictated by the most socially awkward person in history.” — Bill Maher I have the same nagging question. The self-celebrating visionary Mark Zuckerberg continues to express that he knows something about building human ties that the rest of us can learn from his business mission. I see scant evidence that Zuck can guide us anywhere better than where we are at the moment or ha

Some people believe writers are enigmatic figures who spend their days drinking alcohol and taking exotic drugs to enhance their creativity like Lord Byron or Keats were in their day. Others see writers as misunderstood misfits who spend too much time naval gazing to happily exist in the cold hard world of reality. I’m here to shatter that illusion by writing about a typical day in the life of a writer, well, this writer. My day starts when the sun rises. At this time of year

The Sword and the Grail: Restoring the Forgotten Archetype in Arthurian Myth A few years ago, I wrote an essay for a Jungian journal on the meanings of the two key archetypal images in the Matter of Britain, the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. I’ve been thinking about the ideas in that article a lot lately, mostly because I am working on a series of four contemporary Arthurian novels called The Unbroken Circle. The individual books are called The Wi

Can fantasy be myth? Mythopoeia and The Lord of the Rings In June of 1999, I traveled to England for the first time. After a few days in London, my friend Carol Bales (who later became my wife — and illustrator!) and I rented a car and toured around the countryside, visiting sites of mythological importance like Stonehenge, Avebury, Glastonbury Tor, Cadbury, and Tintagel. For us, the history and mythic significance of these sites made the journey more than a vacation; it was

I’ve been a public defender in Seattle for twenty-two years, tried many adult and juvenile cases, and negotiated plea agreements more times that I can count. There’s no question the criminal justice system in the U.S. is broken, particularly when it comes to disturbing disparities in charges and sentencing, with Blacks and Latinos routinely receiving much longer sentences than white offenders. But in an important respect, over the last seventeen years the criminal justice sys

I often wondered whether my sons read up on birth order theory while still in the womb. Embodying the theory, my first-born has always been a striver, an achiever, a perfectionist. When, at about a year old, he started talking, he spoke in complete paragraphs, using multisyllabic words. A straight-A student, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in college and went on to graduate from Harvard Law School. This is what first-borns are supposed to be like. My younger son has generall