OPINION: New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg(D), a phenomenal champion of American Children and Nature, passed on last week at 89. At his NY funeral he was deeply honored by half the Senate on both sides of the aisle, plus NJ Governor Chris Christie (R), Hillary Clinton and Vice President Biden for his passion and foresight in saving millions of Americans through his No Smoking law, raising the drinking age to 21, and fighting for women’s rights and gun control.

BOOK REVIEW: Want to know how and why Washington is such a mess? Two respected analysts of governmental policy, one from the progressive Brookings Institution and the other from the troglodyte American Enterprise Institute, demonstrate that the GOP is at fault.

ARTICLE: In 1977, fellow Olympic skier Billy Kidd and I had an adventure of a lifetime, skiing with Iranian Queen Farah Diba Pahlavi in their fresh "Persian Powder." It was to promote skiing and goodwill with Iran, made possible by two visionary friends, the popular TV host Barry ZeVan and Iran’s Ambassador to the U.S., Ardeshir Zahedi.

BOOK REVIEW: When you're at work, you have some idea of the product or service your employer provides. Not so for "The Girls of Atomic City." They had no idea they were helping create Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII.

BOOK REVIEW: Malcolm X is still controversial nearly 50 years after his assassination. In examining his life from a multitude of perspectives, author Manning Marable brings the reader close to Malcolm's thoughts, deeds, leadership, struggles, conflicts, contradictions, and presence -- which even today seems to have been larger than life.

ARTICLE: The National Ski Areas Association’s NRDC study said that Colorado and Utah would be losing its snow by the end of the century unless there is an intervention - the East likely earlier. Fortunately, a consensus of the UN's 192 countries in 2012 identified the key to regenerating Earth: a combination of science/green energy and Ancient Wisdom, especially through the tribes.

REVIEW: When the United States of America was just a gleam in our founding fathers' eyes, the country faced some fascinating dichotomies, including human equality versus inhumane captivity and popular will versus monarchal rule. These battles and several others play out in intimate detail in Jon Meacham's excellent "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power."

BOOK REVIEW: As science reveals more about our place in the universe, sentient beings are ecstatic about Sean Carroll's "The Particle at the End of the Universe" and its view of what might be called the blueprints of reality.

OPINION: For the last two hundred million years up until 1970, our 'home' looked like this beautiful blue planet from Apollo 17 with three satellites orbiting it. Today, earth is shrouded with about 1,100 satellites, most for cell phone companies, and a half a million pieces of trashed ones, and most dangerous of all, some dumped nuclear waste. Together they are blocking the critical sunlight that Man and Nature need to happily thrive.

REVIEW: A newcomer to American politics would write off the Republican Party as a gang of xenophobic, racist, theocratic, misogynistic, fiscally irresponsible war-mongers. In "Rule and Ruin," Geoffrey Kabaservice explains how and why this happened.