[R]ecently, a friend linked to a post claiming you can easily read 200 books a year. I’ve seen variants of this post before. It goes something like this: the average American spends so many hours a year on social media, and so many hours watching television. The average American reads about so many words per minute, and the…

[L]ast week, I hosted a meeting in my office. I met the visitors in the lobby, escorted them to a conference room, and we took seats. There were introductions—four of them, and me—followed by an exchange of business cards. Well, not really an exchange. I didn’t have any business cards to give them. I haven’t…

[R]eaders of a certain age will remember, perhaps with the nostalgic fondness that I do, a weekly digest magazine called TV Guide. I recently saw a copy of TV Guide on a newsstand, and immediately thought that it wasn’t the same magazine I knew growing up. It was larger, the pages were in color, and…

[D]igging though a zipped archive this week, I came across all of my notes and documents from back when I was taking flying lessons between September 1999 and April 2000. Turns out, I’d written about some of my flights after I made them, and I came across what I’d written about my first solo flight.…

[I] noticed not long ago that the Little Miss was carrying around a small Rubik’s Cube. “Where did you get it?” I asked her. “I got to pick it out as a prize at school,” she told me. I asked her if she knew what it was, and then I explained to her how it…

[S]everal times a week, I receive email from various content writers, content managers, and content marketers asking to provide content for this blog. I receive so many that I have developed a form reply that goes out as soon as these come in. My form reply reads: Dear {Content Marketer}, Thank you for your interest…

[W]ith the first month of 2017 at a close I thought I’d list out and say a few words about what I read. I managed to complete four books in January, all of them nonfiction: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen Explore/Create: My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers,…

[B]ack in the fall of 2016, I switched my to-do list manager from a simple text-file based list to Todoist. I made the switch because I was looking for something with more capabilities than what my text-file offered—in particular, the ability to schedule tasks for certain dates and times. I chose Todoist because it looked…

[W]hen someone asks me, “Where are you from,” my usual, terse reply is, “New York.” Being one of the more populous states, saying “New York” is never good enough. My response is usually followed by another query, “Oh, where in New York?” I used to say New York City, but that leads to further questions…

[E]ach year as January rolls around, parents of Cub Scouts are busily constructing (or purchasing) Pinewood Derby cars for their scouts. As I write this, the Pinewood Derby competition for our pack took place a week ago. The kids all seem to have a good time, but it is something of a farce. In theory,…

[T]his week I was reading An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek. It is another in my quest to read at least one biography of every U.S. President. While reading it one evening, it occurred to me what the problem is reading books on iPads. It was just after Kennedy got the…

[O]ver the weekend, I heard the Little Man mention cursive handwriting. He is in second grade, and it was in second grade that I began learning cursive handwriting. I asked him if he was learning it. “A little,” he said. Apparently, they were working on writing their names in cursive. I am a cursive skeptic.…