Mark Richardson

If you want to lose weight, stop using drugs, get rid of a lousy job, or get out of a bad relationship, you'll have to get your mind right to shake the weight off. In "Get your mind right to shake the weight off, "I discuss my issue with drug abuse as a prison counselor in a repeat drug offender facility. Find out how worked on the problems in my life and became a successful father and published author.

The Trans-Canada, the world’s longest national highway, comes to life in words and pictures. Russia has the Trans-Siberian Highway, Australia has Highway 1, and Canada has the Trans-Canada Highway, an iconic road that stretches almost 8,000 kilometres across six time zones. In the summer of 2012, on the highway’s 50th birthday, Mark Richardson drove its entire length to find out how the road came to be and what it’s now become. In his daily account of the 10-week road trip, originally published as a blog on macleans.ca, he follows the original "pathfinders" Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney, who tried to drive across the country before there were enough roads, he discovers the diverse places along the highway that contribute to the country’s character, and he meets the people who make the Trans-Canada what it is today – the road that connects a nation.

Released in October 1997, the "Flaming Lips' Zaireeka" was met with some critical praise and more general puzzlement. The album comes as four separate CDs intended for playback at the same time. Which means, of course, that four CD players are required. And four amps. And eight speakers. And at least four sets of hands to make them all go. "Zaireeka" requires several people to get together for the express purpose of listening to music; there's nothing to dance to and nothing to look at. It's almost quaint, really. There was a time when people sat together to listen to records; and, "Zaireeka" celebrates this disappearing moment. It is, in other words, an album that does away with the very thing that caused recorded music become a phenomenon so quickly in the 1920s and helped it stay that way ever since: it is not convenient. Ten years later, convenience continues to drive the music business from the top-down and the listening experience from the bottom up. Digital music has become divorced from physical reality; with an MP3 file played on devices using flash ROM, the whole thing happens without a single moving part. Headphones, the sound delivery technology most in favor, blur the borders between device and listener, all in complete isolation. We're shoving the speakers into our ear canals; the music is literally inside of us even before it's left the wire. And so, the human experience of music in the developed world is proceeding along two parallel lines: we're either retreating into a private world of solitary consumption, or we hear music in the background, in coffee shops or on commercials, where it is ambience, part of an environment. Which is part of what makes "Zaireeka" even more fascinating now than it was at the time of release. In addition to being a fantastic album of imaginative psychedelic pop and arguably the Flaming Lips' masterpiece, it was first the final shot fired in the struggle for the rock album to maintain the centrality it had enjoyed since the late 1960s. It defies segmentation. The effort it takes to hear the record properly ensures that the music will be listened to carefully. It's music that even the interested will experience only a few times in their lives; it involves hard work. So listening to "Zaireeka" is a rare event, and it's also a social experience.

Addressing fundamental questions about life, death and the universe, Science and the Spiritual Questexamines the ways in which scientists negotiate the complex frontiers between their scientific and religious beliefs. Distinguished cosmologists, physicians, biologists and computer scientists of different faiths explore the connections between the domain of science and the realms of ethics, spirituality and the divine. Through essays and frank interviews, they offer honest, stimulating, and often intensely personal thoughts about life's most impenetrable mysteries. This unique volume presents radical new approaches to the religion/science debate and highlights the continued importance of the 'spiritual quest' in a world transformed by the developments of science.

Addressing fundamental questions about life, death and the universe, Science and the Spiritual Questexamines the ways in which scientists negotiate the complex frontiers between their scientific and religious beliefs. Distinguished cosmologists, physicians, biologists and computer scientists of different faiths explore the connections between the domain of science and the realms of ethics, spirituality and the divine. Through essays and frank interviews, they offer honest, stimulating, and often intensely personal thoughts about life's most impenetrable mysteries. This unique volume presents radical new approaches to the religion/science debate and highlights the continued importance of the 'spiritual quest' in a world transformed by the developments of science.

A scholarly, annotated, and uniquely comprehensive edition gathers all of Frost's major poetry, a selection of previously unanthologized poems, and the most extensive offering of his prose writings ever published, along with an essay on the texts by the editors.