Self-improvement

In 1925, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski published an essay about the fishermen of the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, where he had done his fieldwork. In the calm inner lagoon, where the catch was reliable, the fishermen used no magic at all. Out on the open sea, “full of danger and uncertainty,” … Read more

Wishing for a different life rarely helps, because wherever we go, there we are. Asking “Now what?” works better than living in the “if only.”

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

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

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

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

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