Healthy people I have a friend whose right knee is stronger than his left. He has the scar to prove it – on his right knee. Dave’s scar began as a scab after reconstructive surgery for a tennis injury. Now that he’s healed, only the scar remains. Permanent scars and temporary scabs used to be…
Say Hey Long before Joe Montana connected with Dwight Clark in the 1982 NFL Championship game, there was The Catch. On September 29, 1954, Willie Mays made an improbable over-the shoulder snag of a 450-foot shot off the bat of Vic Wertz. It probably saved the game for the New York Giants. If you’re too…
Myopia Larry Bird was slow of foot and suffered from White Man’s Disease. Wayne Gretzky was only 6 feet tall and weighed 160 pounds when pundits opined that he was “too small, too wiry, and too slow to be a force in the NHL.”1 Yet Bird and Gretzky are enshrined in their respective Halls of…
Mantras Since 1986, Dr. David Snowdon, an epidemiologist, has directed a research project dubbed the Nun Study. He’s tracking the lives of 678 elderly nuns to assess the effects of aging and Alzheimer’s Disease. Snowdon’s research confirms a clear link between the consumption of certain antioxidants (e.g., lycopene, found in pink grapefruit, tomatoes and watermelon),…
In 1979, Steve Jobs was invited to tour the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. This was the “dream lab” in the foothills behind Stanford, one of Xerox’s famous skunk works. Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander recount the story in Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. The authors describe how…
Higher illiteracy? How many friends came over yesterday to watch the Pro Bowl? You’re kidding. Almost 100 million Americans watched the Super Bowl the Sunday before. Why does the NFL Pro Bowl – featuring a far larger galaxy of stars – draw such a puny audience? If you know the answer, you also understand why…
Why not? Do you ever introduce yourself as a Victorian? If not, why not? Simple. People imagine Victorians as provincial, priggish, prudish and past tense. We’re in a post-Victorian age. If you want to launch a conversation, calling yourself a Victorian is a non-starter. So here’s a question: Do you ever introduce yourself as a…
Joy wills eternity. My father passed away this past Tuesday. I got the news via voice mail after landing at the airport on a business trip. My brother’s message made me feel cramped and claustrophobic in the airplane fuselage. I wanted to crawl out the window.
Get your motor running. Ever wrestled with a decision or had trouble just plain remembering where you put your car keys? What do you do? Some people stop and pray. That’s good. Yet a growing body of new research suggests that pacing the floor, gesturing with our hands, and taking your car for a spin…
ZZZZZZap! No matter who wins the presidential race in November, Social Security won’t be touched. It’s the “third rail” in politics. You touch it you die. In business, you can experience a similar shock if you touch religion, says Nicholas Wolterstorff. “If the businessman, rather than being motivated by the bottom line of profit, allows…