I was never in a fistfight as a kid, but I was in a lot of finger fights. Or should I call them by their official name: tickle fights. I more or less broke even in these bouts of hysteria, but win or lose, I had the same experience after each one: utter relaxation. It was as if every iota…
Growing pains. No pain, no gain. A pain in the neck. No matter how you say it, pain hurts. But being able to feel pain is vital to our survival; that’s why we have millions of pain receptors all over our bodies. Pain helps us learn to avoid what can hurt us. It also alerts us to conditions that may…
An editor once remarked after reviewing the third revision of an essay I was trying to perfect, “You’ve rewritten this so many times it’s turned brown.” Her analogy to children who color and recolor the pictures in a coloring book was spot-on. I had tweaked the essay too much. Instead of a simple message that floated off the page, it…
Second Acts is a series of interviews with interesting people who discovered new pathways midway through their lives. On January 15, 2009, just moments after takeoff, US Airways flight 1549 collided with a flock of geese, which shut down the engines and resulted in the famed “Miracle on the Hudson.” Captain Sullenberger crash-landed the plane in the icy Hudson River with time…
The devastation wrought in the Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan is beyond comprehension—thousands of lives lost, entire villages obliterated, more than 500,000 people displaced, and as many as 12 million people at risk. It was the strongest tropical cyclone to make landfall in recorded human history. We can’t fully process such vast suffering, but we can act with compassion by reaching…
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you find Western secular culture a breeding ground for the worst human values and qualities, from unquenchable selfishness and greed to unconscionable meanness and hard-heartedness. You are disgusted by the moral free-for-all that profits no one except the insanely rich. You hunger for a saner world than secular culture fosters—one committed to enriching, rather…
Cathy Cruz Marrero was texting while walking in the Berkshire Mall in Reading, Pennsylvania, when she tumbled headfirst into a water fountain, getting completely drenched. Her pratfall was caught by the mall’s surveillance video and then posted on YouTube, where it has been viewed almost 2 million times. Consider the father of three young children I knew who died instantly…
