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
If you think Artificial Intelligence is about Simpsons memes, cat soap operas, or asking ChatGPT to roleplay as a drunk, think again. AI is here, NOW, and it’s not the sloppy “I’ll guess answers and give you some half-truths” tool. With recent code releases such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex, a true … Read more
Here’s a confession: I have six browser tabs open right now, a to-do list glaring at me, and a brain that’s simultaneously catastrophizing about what’s happening in my house downstairs and how AI is going to change our jobs and lives. If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you know I think a lot … Read more
I read about someone who, after returning from a hiatus at work, found themselves so paralyzed by the mountain of unread emails in their inbox that they did something radical: they deleted their entire Inbox. And replaced it with a single outgoing message that said something along the lines of, “If you were waiting for … Read more
Not knowing where or how to begin is the downfall of many creative pursuits. The reason so many creative projects don’t make it past the idea stage is what most writers colloquially refer to as the “blank page syndrome.” There are good reasons to dread the blank page. You have to make decisions on what … Read more
I have a minimal social media presence, plus I strictly enforce a hard cap on how much time I spend there. And yet, even I can feel the online pressure that comes with a New Year and the expectation that we should miraculously morph into entirely different people overnight. The TikToks and self-help gurus roll … Read more
Just before the holidays, I ordered a tablet for a work project. There was a seasonal promotion running at the time: buy the tablet, get a free wireless keyboard. In my multitasking, list-checking, end-of-year rush, I forgot to add the keyboard to my order. A couple of weeks later, after the tablet arrived, I went … Read more