I love that the contributions to the “Things I Have Learned” series keep coming in. I asked a small number of my writer friends to participate at the outset, but now the majority of participants have volunteered themselves and that’s fantastic. Keep ’em coming, all! Today’s list comes from Amy Spooner, who I met when she profiled me for the…
Today’s installment in the “Things I Have Learned” series comes from a colleague at my first job after college, where I worked as a reporter at the Alpena News. If you’ve never heard of Alpena, think cold. It’s five hours north of Detroit, and in addition to learning a tremendous amount about real-life newspapers, I learned such things as how…
Today is installment #3 in the “Things I Have Learned” series, with this latest list coming from Amanda Hirsch, a friend I met thanks to the wonder of Twitter. Previous lists have come from: me Margaret Yang Amanda Hirsch is a writer and comedian. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Jordan, their dog, Cosmo, and a lot…
Giving up drinking for a month helped me see the social role we give booze, and made me feel physically better. So now what?
Writer and artist Emilie Wapnick says you’re not a quitter or flaky or waiting for your real passion to show itself. Instead, if you’re a polymath or Renaissance man, you bring three superpowers to your multiple interests.
I am far from having all of life’s answers — in fact, as I get older, I think my list of questions keeps growing — but I do think there’s value in acknowledging what life experience has taught me. Shortly after I turned 40, I kicked off a blog series here called “Things I Have Learned.” I started with 40 things I…
The world would be a lovely place if we were all kind and respectful and loving toward one another. Unfortunately, there are greedy people, bullies and manipulators among us, to name just a few of the difficult people we all have to encounter. How should we handle these people who make us feel less than great? A recent Deepak Chopra…
If you’re looking for a little reading material today — maybe the Sunday paper isn’t doing it for you, maybe you’re a bit hung over from ringing in the new year, maybe you’re killing time ’til a college bowl game — I’m here to help. According to my WordPress stats, these were my 10 most-visited posts in 2011: Why the…
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently ran an interesting amateur sociology experiment: he solicited what he called “life reports” from people 70 years old and up, sharing what they had done well and poorly, then he combed them for lessons. With the giant caveats that: these are people who read the New York Times and opted in to sharing…
I grew up in an agricultural state. Michigan grows cherries, apples and sugar beets, among other things, and to live in Michigan is to know the mantra “knee high by the Fourth of July” is a growth measure for the huge expanses of corn fields all over the state.
But I don’t think I’d even heard the phrase “farmers’ market” until I was out of college. Ironically, it’s in super urban New York City where farmers’ markets have transformed both how we shop and how we eat, in both cases for the better.
If you’ve taken even a single management seminar, you’ve heard about how people hate change. You’re warned that no matter how terrible the problem you’re solving, your staff will likely cling to the way we’ve always done things and resist the new way. But we don’t just resist change when it’s imposed from outside. We often put blinders on to…
How the hell do you do that? It’s a question my husband and I have gotten frequently since 2011. That’s when we first went to live in New Orleans for two months. Since then we’ve returned to New Orleans multiple times, we have lived for a month in San Francisco, then after that in a small town in southern Long Island close…
Experts point to cognitive, physical and physiological benefits when families eat together.
It also just feels good to connect.
Need some inspiration or pointers to share a meal? Check this out.
