SPIRITUAL SURF: When dinosaur media properties fight for life in an industry depression and macro recession, they invade whose turf?

Love, loss, realization, sex and “sin” are some of the life highs and lows that provoke spiritual exploration in the first place, and are among the core themes to which Soul’s Code is devoted.

We are amused when Old Media tries to juice summer newsstands sales by doing what we do best.

TIME’s attempt: “An increasingly fragile construct depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness, as defined by and for its adult principals, the intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant assault.”

Wow, what (an original) concept.  Think Ann Coulter said it first. In 1860.

Daniel Goleman on “the happiest man in the world” in the New York Times

The remaining staff of the New York Times has figured out that there may be deeper layers to life than checking your stocks. They launched a new department called “Happy Days”. They sell it like so:

“The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives.  For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed.  Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.

A recent instalment is by Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman, about Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama who has been dubbed “the happiest man in the world.”

The new New Yorker magazine produces a grand-slam of spiritual news and stories

At least when the The New Yorker invades Soul’s Code turf, they’re way-smart and elegant:

Fun with Nuns

The writer Paul Rudnick makes fun of Disney and the making of his script for “Sister Act”:

Team Disney, Team Middler, Scott Rudin and I sat in a meeting discussing Catholic teachings on vows of silence, poverty and chastity, and the specifics of the Franciscan versus Benedictine order. Glancing around, I realized that I was analysing papal dogma with a roomful of Jews.”

Cold Souls:

Speaking of movies, the New Yorker offers an advance peak of the Paul Giametti vehicle, “Cold Souls,” a movie inspired by a literal dream that the director had. The actor’s soul is stolen by Russian soul traffikers from a facility on Roosevelt Island called Soul Storage, where Giametti’s character had assumed it was safe.

Theories why the CDC records that one-third of Americans are now overweight:

Soul’s Code has its “PBI”, and the New Yorker is all over the BMI, which according to the lastest data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control shows that one-third of Americans are now overweight (not at our gym!). New books ranging from Globesity to Mindless Eating, explain why.

“The Temperature of Hell” is a funny global-warming-inspired essay by in-house author, Ian Frazier.

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