In 1929, at a Women’s Exposition, the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company unveiled a new kitchen. Lillian Gilbreth had designed it. Everything sat in a tidy L, with counters at heights that didn’t wreck anyone’s back. To prove it worked, testers made a strawberry shortcake in an ordinary kitchen and then in hers. The number of … Read more
In the fall of 1936, The Literary Digest mailed ten million ballots to American voters and announced that it would settle the presidential election before Election Day. The magazine had correctly predicted the previous five elections. This time, it promised to be accurate within a fraction of one percent. About 2.4 million people mailed back … Read more
On December 18, 1933, a man calling himself B. Virdot placed an advertisement in the Canton Repository in Ohio. He offered money to families struggling through the Depression. All they had to do was write and describe their circumstances. He promised to keep their identities private, along with his own. He had set aside $750, … Read more
In 1879, James Murray signed a contract with Oxford University Press to edit a new English-language dictionary. He estimated the work to take ten years. After five years, the first installment of Murray’s work appeared. It covered A to Ant. Murray worked in a corrugated-iron shed in his garden in Oxford. He called it the … Read more
On March 4, 1928, at half past three in the afternoon, 199 men lined up at Legion Ascot Speedway in Los Angeles and set off to run to New York City. The promoter was C.C. Pyle, known around the sports desks as Cash and Carry Pyle, and he was offering $25,000 to whoever posted the … Read more
On December 1, 1930, the Kellogg Company in Battle Creek, Michigan, cut its workday from eight hours to six. W.K. Kellogg split three daily shifts into four and handed his employees back two hours a day. It was an instant success. The newspapers wrote it up as the shape of things to come. Then, decade … Read more
On a Sunday afternoon in October 1926, the greatest escape artist who ever lived died in a Detroit hospital bed. Harry Houdini had spent his career slipping out of handcuffs, straitjackets, and a nailed packing crate lowered into New York’s East River. He built a national reputation on the promise that no restraint could hold … Read more
In August 1915, The Atlantic Monthly published a short poem by Robert Frost called The Road Not Taken. In the hundred-plus years since, it has appeared on coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and in most graduation speeches on record. It is also, according to the Paris Review, the most misread poem in America. We quote it … Read more
On October 14, 1926, the London publisher Methuen & Co. released a slim children’s book by A. A. Milne, a playwright and Punch humorist who would spend the rest of his life mildly annoyed that this was what made him famous. Winnie-the-Pooh was an instant hit. Its American publisher sold 150,000 copies before the end … Read more
In the spring of 1947, police trying to enter a brownstone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street in Harlem could not open the front door. Behind it were the lifetime acquisitions of two brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, who for decades had carried things in and almost nothing back out. When the … Read more
On March 4, 1933, a man who could not walk to the podium without help stood in front of a country that had largely stopped believing in itself. A quarter of the workforce was idle, banks were failing by the hundreds, and people were hoarding cash in mattresses and gold in coffee cans. That’s when … Read more
August 4, 1936. The Olympiastadion in Berlin, long jump qualifying round. Jesse Owens, already the fastest man in the world, had fouled his first two attempts. One more foul and he would be out — no medal, or no final — in front of 100,000 spectators and one particularly invested Führer. The story goes that … Read more
The morning after Johnny Kelley won the 1935 Boston Marathon, he went to work, showing up at 7:30 a.m. at a greenhouse in Arlington, Massachusetts. After winning one of the most grueling footraces in the country, he had every reason in the world to sleep in. And yet. I’ve spent a good chunk of the … Read more
In April 2009, a 47-year-old church volunteer from a village in West Lothian, Scotland walked onto the stage of Britain’s Got Talent wearing a dress and hairdo that, as one reporter put it, might have been stylish when Dwight Eisenhower was president. The camera cut to Simon Cowell, who was sneering. It cut to the … Read more
Confession: I rarely watch YouTube videos or listen to Podcasts on normal speed. I have to at least 1.5x it most of the time. Patience, it turns out, is not a single muscle. It is many. And I have spent most of my life training the wrong ones. I’ve written about patience before. I leaned, … Read more
I can’t remember the last time I went out for a run without my phone, music, or watch. I’ve forgotten what it would be like to not track distance, heart rate, or my running pace. I’m not sure I could stand running five miles without a podcast or music, with just my own thoughts for … Read more
A few summers ago, on an early morning run, I spotted a woman about a quarter mile ahead of me. From where I was, I could watch her without her seeing me. She was walking backward, waving her arms in some kind of expansive, unhurried gesture, and either singing or reciting something to the sunrise. … Read more
This weekend, my eighty-year-old mother came with us to a dinner at a friend’s house. Earlier in the day, she asked me what time she needed to be ready, and then she asked her real question: “Can I bring my phone with me?” Not that she needs my permission, and also, just for the record, … Read more
Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle. Bob Hope I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling inexplicably tired after doing things that used to feel easy — that vague sense that my body had become a slightly less cooperative version of itself. No sharp pains, no dramatic symptoms, but noticeable … Read more
Here’s a confession: I’ve spent years writing about self-improvement, and I’m not entirely sure it’s made me better at any of it. What it has done is make me very good at recognizing, with painful clarity, the exact moment I’m doing the wrong thing. After going back through some older posts recently, I noticed they … Read more