According to the Chinese lunar calendar, today is Duanwujie (端午節), or the Dragon Boat Festival. Celebrating this holiday includes eating zongzi (粽子), glutinous rice wrapped and cooked in bamboo leaves, racing dragon boats, and drinking realgar wine. I’ve never drank this wine before. Realgar is an arsenic sulfide mineral, the wine has the mineral mixed into it, and I’m pretty sure it would taste nasty.

When you think of the CIA, you may envision an elite squad of the brightest and most daring individuals in the country equipped with state-of-the-art gadgets and weapons. You may imagine them penetrating into the highest echelons of terrorist groups and working deep undercover in the most hostile foreign nations. You may see them defending America’s national security by reporting invaluable intelligence procured by deftly cultivating relationships with defectors and suavely deceiving the unsuspecting.

Forget whatever image of the CIA that Hollywood or Tom Clancy portray. The truth is a lot less glamorous and a whole lot more disturbing.

The movie American Beauty completely captivated me. I watched it three times within the span of two days and listened to the entirety of both audio commentaries by the director, Sam Mendes, and the writer, Alan Ball. American Beauty raised such disturbing and profound questions about American society and families. When I learned that Ball had also written HBO’s television series Six Feet Under, which I had not seen at the time, I had to get my hands on the DVDs.

I finished all five seasons in eight months, and I must say, what a journey.

Johann Hari, a reporter for the UK’s The Independent, tells it like it is in his article on how to detect and deflate a lacking rhetorical device.

If you haven’t read his amazing article “The Dark Side of Dubai,” you should.

Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994) makes no attempt to romanticize the past. The film tells the incredible journey of a Chinese family from horrific civil war in the 1940s to the tragic mistakes of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. It tells this story matter-of-factly without unneeded garnish and allows the main couple, Jiazhen (played by Gong Li) and Fugui (the talented Ge Yo), to display for themselves the depths of human emotion and spirit.

The air in my hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts has never smelled so fresh. Having been in the concrete jungle of New York City for so long, my nose has grown accustomed to the smell of frat party aftermaths, fumes from beleaguered taxi cabs, and decaying detritus spilled and neglected by trash collectors. Therefore, the air here 202 miles away from the Big Apple is an amenity I never realized I sorely missed.