Maybe it's because I'm finally get to think about fun almost all the time. But I'm getting gleanings from the world at large that fun might be on the verge of becoming newsworthy.

For example, there's Oprah, or at least the editors of her magazine, who devoted an entire issue, more or less, to Fun.

For an even better example, there's Anna Quindlan's remarkably intelligent Newsweek article "Doing Nothing is Something" in which she writes:

"It is not simply that it is pathetic to consider the lives of children who don’t have a moment between piano and dance and homework to talk about their day or just search for split ends, an enormously satisfying leisure-time activity of my youth. There is also ample psychological research suggesting that what we might call “doing nothing” is when human beings actually do their best thinking, and when creativity comes to call. Perhaps we are creating an entire generation of people whose ability to think outside the box, as the current parlance of business has it, is being systematically stunted by scheduling."

And then there's this article I wrote for the August issue of the humanistic psychology magazine AHP Perspective - an article about the Fun Intelligence - where I play with the idea that maybe our abilities to have fun and create fun are critical to our very survival. And, typical of me when I start playing around with things, I'm starting to take this whole thing seriously. I don't know if it's an intelligence or an ability or an attribute, but, with a little help from the media, I'm beginning to allow myself to believe that it's critical, vital to the evolution of our species and the growth of our very persons.