When it comes to today’s young adults, it’s much easier to spread the word on their own turf, and most of the time that turf is in pop culture and entertainment, increasingly known as their bastard baby, infotainment.

Is it any wonder President Obama enlisted the help of Zach Galifianakis to push the Affordable Care Act in its final days of enrollment, or used a screening of the new big-budget Cesar Chavez biopic to reignite talk on immigration reform, federal minimum wage hikes or income inequality?

First Lady Michelle Obama has been a reoccurring guest on the late-night, midday and early-morning talk show circuit since the Obama administration entered the White House in hopes of furthering the cause of her obesity-prevention programs for children.

It’s smart outreach that targets where people are listening and engaging.

The FLOTUS was aiming for where the moms and dads are hanging...

Talking Angela robbed my little girl of a peaceful night’s rest this week. With a headful of bad information passed down from an uninformed parent to that parent’s misinformed child, we had a situation at the Brown home.

As parents, we’re all used to putting out fires, solving crises and generally applying salve to the wounds, physical and mental. Yet nothing grinds my gears worse than setting straight info delivered from a parent whose job it is to know better, or at the very least educate themselves in the opposite direction of kneejerk-ism.

I’d already read about Talking Angela a few weeks ago making my usual rounds among the news aggregation sites, but I didn’t expect to have a lengthy conversation about it with my 8-year-old. It’s an app for smartphones or tablets that has so far been downloaded more than 10 million times, and it made one little girl very scared at bedtime.

A...

There was a time when people cared in this country. About a lot of things.

They cared about the state of the nation, the state of the world, their fellow man, creatures great and small.

They discussed, dissected and immersed themselves in a lot of weighty, important issues, ultimately for the betterment of the planet.

Can the same be said today? Do we care? Do we listen? Are we paying attention to the world around us?

Look around today; the signs are all over the place, like indelible images of grave concern seared into the subconscious, taking up prime real estate in the conscious.

The Ukraine. The Koch Brothers. George Soros. The NSA and Ed Snowden. Barack Hussein Obama. Trans fat. Transsexual bathrooms. Legalized marijuana. Legalized gay marriage. Do you know what it all means in your life? I sure as hell know what it means in mine.

If you’ve already stopped reading, you’re part...

David Bowie once referred to the Pixies as the “psychotic Beatles,” calling them a band that created music “just about the most compelling of the entire ’80s.”

This week I had the chance to see the Pixies live at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas one night, and the next, enjoyed a career retrospective of The Beatles through Cirque Du Soleil’s “Love” at the Mirage.

It was a sonic one-two punch for any music lover, and it really got me thinking about these bands’ place in history and how they fit together in that story.

The Beatles and Pixies comparisons don’t come as often as they should, partly because much of the Pixies’ music, when not being completely accessible in its pop construction, veers in the completely opposite direction in its dissonance and paint-peeling volume with thick sheets of feedback from Joey Santiago’s unconventional guitar style or Black Francis’...

Ever heard of Balaji Srinivasan?

He’s a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a Stanford lecturer and a leading proponent of creating a techno-utopia achieved through seceding from the United States.

He’s not crazy, and he’s obviously highly intelligent with multi-million-dollar bonafides and a proven record of successful digital entrepreneurship.

Yet he is among a very small, wealthy and brilliant class of American businessman who see Silicon Valley as the citadel on the hill, an island of innovation that deserves special privileges in this country for the intellectual successes it cultivates and the glory it brings the nation and the state.

And that island idea? Well, Google CEO Larry Page sees the techno-utopia as a real place that floats and is surrounded by water but not constrained by national laws … and tax codes, I’d guess.

Better still, maybe you’ve heard of Tim Draper. He...

This will be the first winter Olympics since Nagano where I haven’t been the I.V. Press’ curling writer and color analyst for CNBC’s 3 a.m. simulcast of the luge mixed team qualifiers.

The powers that be have asked me to sit this one out in protest against the Russian government’s insistence that 70 percent of the Sochi Media Village’s menus consist of borscht. Sadly, the American media tour rider for hotdogs and tacos was rejected as gay propaganda.

But, I’ve made a lot of contacts over the years, and on Thursday afternoon, one of my best sources forwarded me some emails between top execs at NBC Universal Sports. For the second consecutive Olympics, they are trying to figure out how to make the games matter in the era of streaming Internet, and their turmoil is pretty clear.

Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Universal Sports, New York City:

Gary, what the holy hell is going on over...

It’s official: The Nobel Peace Prize nomination process, and maybe even the way the victors are chosen, is about as legit as an MTV Movie Awards.

The Nobel Foundation still has its awards for medicine, physics, literature, chemistry and economics, all high-powered, highly regarded and well-earned distinctions in disciplines where almost all the subjectivity and novelty has been filtered out.

But the peace category, well, it’s gotten a bad rap for decades with questionable nominations and suspect wins, and this year it stoops to the level of “Best WTF Moment” or “Best Shirtless Performance.” What would make this year’s ceremony complete would be a gala performance by Justin Bieber with a hologram Tupac thrown in for flavor.

Instead, American exile and federal leaker Edward Snowden may actually have a shot at cruising the red carpet in Stockholm, Sweden, with Selena Gomez on his arm en...

Laura Jane Grace lives on the other side of the country, making a life for herself in Florida as a working punk rock musician in the fairly well-known band Against Me!

Her other claim to fame is, that up until two years ago, Grace lived and performed as Thomas James Gabel, the male-born singer, guitarist and songwriter for a band that had been building a consistent punk following for more than a decade.

Earlier this week, Against Me! released its sixth studio album and the first with a fully realized and transitioned Grace as the front woman. Titled, aptly, “Transgender Dysphoria Blues,” it’s almost entirely a document of Gabel coming to terms with his inner turmoil as he allowed Grace to show her true self, now his true self.

The Gabel/Grace story is not a new one. It made for some shocking reading when he sprung it on his fans three years ago in Rolling Stone. The orbit of the story...

After a pretty mild last few years, flu season is back with a particularly nasty strain that has folks packed into local ERs and doctors’ offices, where polite society is forced to mingle with the riffraff like common sardines among the catches of the day.

I just read that seven people have died from the flu so far this year in California, and up to 30 deaths are being investigated to see whether this new version is to blame. I’m not so sure the flu I’ve got is actually fatal, but I do find myself still reeling from the effects, not quite my usual self but still better than most at half strength.

Certainly it must be the flu doing this; how dare anyone think anything different? This is an illness that can be tough on the very young and the very old, both of whom have compromised immune systems and not much else to offer the world. What is the flu if not a thinning of the herd...

Bigger, better animal facilities. More animal control officers. Teaching responsible pet ownership. Animal abusers held accountable for their crimes.

If our three-day series on animal issues showed me anything, it’s that locals really care about their pets, and more important, what becomes of other people’s pets, abandoned, lost or abused.

This was a package of stories people really seemed to get behind. It makes me think the stakeholders involved in finding solutions could come at them more aggressively. At least the county officials or the governmental entities, which communicated in a lot of generalities and addressed the needs and concerns in very noncommittal ways.

To some extent, I can understand that. The county health department, the lead agency driving the needs assessment that studied what is best for doggies and kitties around here, has to make sure the city of El Centro is...