What is the current market value of a Nobel Prize? Until yesterday, that question would have been virtually impossible to answer, which proved to be advantageous to the family of Francis Crick. Heritage Auctions, the entity that conducted the sale of Crick’s 23-carat gold medal in New York this week, declared it a "historic moment."

As such, bidding started at $250,000.

As happens with many gay men, my childhood was rendered infinitely brighter and more flamboyant by the presence of Barbie. But the biggest Barbie moment of my life centers around not me, but my parents.

As long as I can remember, my mother has had a fascination with Barbie dolls. As an Indian immigrant, she viewed them as flawless examples of Americana. Once, when our young next-door neighbor added an Indian Barbie to her fledgling Barbies of the World Collection, I thought that my mother’s tiny head would pop off at this conflagration of East-meets-West madness. Another time I remarked on her excitement as she was gift-wrapping a Malibu [...]

(This letter is an excerpt from the new memoir Public Apology, out today!)

Sorry for choosing Hannah and Her Sisters when you asked me to go out and rent some movies for our family to watch to get our minds off the fact that Dad had been diagnosed with cancer.

You remember, I'm sure, that this was just a couple weeks before I graduated from high school. It must have been a weekend, because we were all at home in the afternoon. Dad walked in to the TV room with his friend David Landy. You could tell that David Landy had been crying.

"The doctor just hit me [...]

"People are taking a more expansive view of what a family is. But for any family that doesn't fit the 1960s Ozzie and Harriet mold, slow and steady doesn't feel fast enough." -Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Family Equality Council, reacting to a study conducted by Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell that found that 68 percent of respondents believed that same-sex couples with children counted as "family"-up from 54 percent in 2003. Powell's team surveyed more 2,300 people over seven years. The bad news is: as recently as 2006, 30 percent of respondents counted pets as family but not gay couples. Powell said, "The sheer idea that [...]