"Rediscover--or discover for the first time--the things that make you passionate in life. Vital Signs is about what inspires passion and what defeats it. How we lose it and how we get it back. And, ultimately, it's about the endless yet endlessly fruitful tug-of-war between freedom and domestication, the wild in us and the tame, our natural selves and our conditioned selves. Each chapter in Gregg Levoy's Vital Signs contains a core sample, an intimate...

"A decade ago, James Lang banned cell phones in his classroom. Frustrated by how easily they could sidetrack his students, Lang sought out a distraction-free environment, hoping it would help his students pay attention to his lessons. But after just a few years, Lang gave in. Not only was his no-cellphones policy ineffective (even his best students ignored it), he realized that he, like many of his fellow teachers, was missing an important point....