Each year growing up in South Carolina, my grandmother would pack us in the car and take us for a day of apple picking. I still find it one of life’s simplest, healthiest pleasures from start to finish. 'Tis the season to gather your brood and check out a local orchard for treats that last for weeks. Kids love it, the landscape is beautiful, and when was the last time you climbed a tree? There are more than 7,500 apple cultivars, and my personal favorite is the sweet and juicy Macoun. Pair with your favorite white wine and cheese. Yum.

I'm listening to one of my favorites, the emotionally powerful, kick-ass bi-lingual singer Lysa Flores, who blends beauty and pain like few songwriters, weaving soaring vocals and dissonant harmonies with passion, flashes of anger, and plenty of love. There are accents of her strong-women forbearers—The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, X's Exene Cervenka, Alanis Morissette and Natalie Merchant—if they'd grown up on the east side of East Los Angeles. In songs like "Amanecer" "Birthday," and "Light Among Shadows:, she portrays pain so poignantly that you root for her to escape it—and yet you want to hear more about how she does. Here's looking forward to her next album. And the one after that.

America's true National Theater resides right now at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival under the leadership of Artistic Director Bill Rauch. Go now to see his extraordinary production of Hamlet. It’s as vivid, immediate, powerful, and emotional a production of Shakespeare as you are ever likely to experience—and it’s only running through October.

I read little poetry but made an exception for Joe Hassett's W.B. Yeats and the Muses. The mystic Yeats came down to earth inspired by nine fascinating women who, in widely differing ways, moved him. Newly available letters and manuscripts provide a fascinating context illustrating Yeats' contention that “works of lyric genius, when the circumstances of their origin is known, gain a second beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life.”

My latest favorite goodies are Laura Mercier's Sangria lipstick and Scarlet lip stain. You can wear them day into night and they always make me feel instantly prettier. I also love Maybelline's new Volum' Express the Falsies Waterproof Mascara in very black. Plus, it's only $7.49! They're all you need when you're on the go.

While traveling, my wife and I encountered a delightful couple with a fascinating story of life and time enduring love. Among common interests, we discovered a shared passion for food. Fellow gourmands, try this scrumptious Dal Tadka recipe, similar to our friends’: Boil ½ cup of yellow lentils with roughly chopped onion, ½ teaspoon  of turmeric, 1 tomato, 6 cloves of garlic, 1 inch piece of ginger, pinch of salt, ½ teaspoon each of coriander, chili and cumin powders. Once tender, grind the daal with a large spoon and set aside. In a frying pan, add 1 ½ tablespoon of canola oil, 1 teaspoon of mustard seeds, 5 curry leaves, 5 dry red chilies, 5 cloves of garlic and 1 tablespoon cumin seeds. Brown this mixture on low flame without burning. Once golden brown, add it to the daal, allow the aromas to mingle and enjoy with rice.

Growing up in communist China as a child, I was taught to suppress my creativity, but I always fought that. Recently, reading The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World proved to me what I always knew—that my gut was right. Our world and our lives thrive and evolve through creativity.

A favorite family summer tradition is going to the Warwick Drive-In, one of the Northeast's last old- fashioned drive-in movie theaters, about 50 miles from New York City in Warwick, NY. Nowadays, the soundtrack is pumped in through your car radio rather than through clunky car-window speakers. But otherwise, it's a time capsule from the Mad Men era, with kids in pajamas playing catch, grownups picnicking beside their cars, even those ‘50s-vintage intermission reels of animated dancing hot dogs and candy bars.

Normally my summer reading is strictly mindless. But I can’t put down a new book I received in my guise as a sustainability reporter, Off the Grid by journalist and documentary film-maker Nick Rosen. This non-fiction paperback is dripping with irony—even as we become better connected via the Internet and seemingly ubiquitous mobile phones, communities of people across America are choosing to live beyond the reach of water and electric meters. These aren’t just fringe environmentalists, these are people like you and me. Considering that one goal of the so-called smart grid is that it tap sources of independent electricity-generating capacity, the people profiled in Rosen’s book might be onto something. Rosen even suggests the U.S. government fund several experimental off-the-grid developments. Quick read for those interested in the philosophy of energy dependence.

The lead actor in Showtime's Dexter is fantastic as a serial killer who targets only the bad guys. As a prosecutor, I always wondered why killers killed, and at least in this series I finally get an answer. I read the books first and wanted to see how the TV series compared. The human is a very complex creature...even the bad ones. This proves there is actually something good on TV.