Jayson Blair

Regardless of your religion, the color of your skin, your ethnic origin, your political affiliation or the way you cast your ballot in the recent Presidential election, you would have to have a blindfold wrapped around your eyes and earplugs in your ears to not notice that many Americans are afraid. In the days since the election of Donald Trump, a wash of anxiety and fear has flowed through my office, one client at a time.  To be sure, some of my clients are indeed excited and hopeful about the prospect of the Trump presidency. They are the ones who felt that the y were on the outside looking in during the last 8 years of Barack Obama’s presidency. But there is no question that the overwhelming number of people I have encountered a re experiencing a level of angst and disquiet that they say they have not experienced since 9/11, in some cases, and, for others, in their lives. Indeed, a Gallup poll released on November 11 showed that 42 percent of Americans were afraid as a r...

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a brilliant mathematician and a suffer of something, depending on whom you ask, in the neighborhood of schizophrenia and manic depression. Nash, who died in a car accident with his wife a little more than a week ago, was, first and foremost, a Nobel laureate, whom, like many mathematicians, made his greatest discoveries in his 20s (As G.H. Hardy wrote in 1940, of “all the arts and sciences mathematics is the most remote” and “no mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than an other art or science, is a young man’s game”). Knowing that history and those peculiarities of mathematics and mathematicians, strange behaviors –extended solitude, writing equations on walls, a frenetic pace to develop solutions, mumbling to themselves in public – probably did not seem so far outside the norm among his brethren at Princeton University. But, according to a 2010 edition of The Princetonian , the daily newspaper at Princeto...

Standing in the front of the coffee table last night, I picked up my phone to check the news and saw the headline. Robin Williams was dead at the age 63. I clicked on the link with a mindset that some horrible accident must have happened. Perhaps he died of a tragic illness that took his life early, like cancer. I was right about the tragic illness, it appeared. I had just picked the wrong horrible disease. Early reports suggest that Williams, the actor and comedian known for his standup and movies like “Good Will Hunting,” “Patch Adams” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” died of asphyxiation, most likely caused, according to the Marion County, California sheriff’s office, by suicide. That Williams suffered from drug addiction I knew from his standup. What I did not know was that he suffered from the same disease that ailed me, bipolar disorder. In a 2006 episode of “Fresh Air,” the NPR radio show, Williams told host Terry Gross, “Do I perform sometimes in a manic style? Yes. Am...

I love being home on Saturdays with my family. I enjoy my morning rituals. I enjoy the hikes we tend to take along the Potomac River, the museums we visit and the dinners in Washington. I especially like my morning espresso at the coffee shop down the street from where I live and the espresso at a Georgetown place better known for its cupcakes. I like my rituals. So, its with hesitation that I interrupt them. Doing so has a tendency to scramble the Rubix cube in my brain. Like any Rubix cube, it can be difficult to get back in order again. As I headed off to the Harvard Medical School-McLean Hospital conference on Coaching in Leadership and Healthcare this weekend, I thought that my Rubix cube had a chance of being broken if it turned out to be a disappointment. Well, its still in tack and I am walking away from the conference with a few more techniques on how to solve my own puzzles and help others put theirs together. My concern came from the simple fact that some many of th...

I wrote a piece for Newsweek last night and gave a Q&A to Salon on the journalism scandal involving Jonah Lehrer. I have sympathy for him. Another young promising journalist whose self-sabotage is lead to the end of his career (he worked for The New Yorker until yesterday). I vividly remember that feeling of not being able to let go as my career crumbled like the Monte Cassino under weeks of Allied bombing in World War II Italy. Its hard to let go even when the building is crumbling. I know its probably feels like the end of something special, but I hope this bright young man finds redemption waiting for him in the future.

Shalom is a word that has many meanings. It is a Hebrew word that means peace, welfare, completeness, hello and goodbye. In his 1995 eulogy at Yitzak Rabin's funeral, Bill Clinton captured the world when he uttered the simple Hebrew phrase, "Shalom Chaver" -- Farewell, my friend.  This week I had the unfortunate duty of saying goodbye to my friend. In Beth Nielsen Chapman's song "Sand and Water," which is about the premature death of her husband, she sings "All alone, I came into this world. All alone, I will someday die." And so it was with my friend, who died under a bridge, homeless and alone. There is, however, a notion embedded in that song about the impact a person can have in between those two points of being alone -- the impact they can have on our lives. As Nielsen Chapman sings, "I will see you in the light of a thousand suns. I will hear you in the sound of the waves. I will know you when I come, as we all will com...