Even as I scramble my way through books, and write posts on productivity, life continues, a river wholly unconcerned with my mundane thoughts and opinions. There is no PAUSE button to keep the kids from growing up while I’m engaged in these activities. Remember the Little Man? He has grown into a strapping teenager, taller…
April 6 marks a special anniversary for me. On April 6, 1996, I began to keep the diary which I still maintain today. Four years earlier, on April 6, 1992, Isaac Asimov died. The two events are most definitely related, as we shall see. Sometime in the early spring of 1994, while wandering through a…
What is the first book you remember? Pressed to answer this question, eyes traversing the tall silhouettes, pillars of the shelves in my office, thoughts spelunking into the increasingly shadowy regions of my early memory, I’d have to say that the first book I remember is Dr. Seuss’s Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You…
While reading an article on “The Wonder of Insight” by John Kounios and Yvette Koumios in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, I came across the following passage: In the 2010s Brian Erickson, then a doctoral student in John’s laboratory at Drexel University, and his colleagues demonstrated that people’s tendency toward insightful or analytical thinking…
Where were you when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon? When John F. Kennedy was assassinated? When the first plane hit the World Trade Center? We have a knack for recalling our circumstances during world-shaking events. For me, I remember what I was reading. Perhaps it is simply a weird trick…
Selfishly, I wish we’d do away with Daylight Saving Time. As an early riser, who heads out for a 2-1/2 mile walk first thing each morning, I prefer walks in the half hour before sunrise. Each spring forward hurtles me back into morning darkness for my walks. I take a light with me that I…
Some books are a call to action. Such was Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon. This book set me off on two paths of discovery: one on the U.S. space program before the space shuttle era; the other was one to see if I could be part of that program. It started with the HBO miniseries From…
I’m back from another recent jaunt to the future to scout out interesting books that will be hitting the shelves. One of the more exciting books that I’ve mentioned elsewhere is a new posthumous collection of essays by the late David McCullough called History Matters. I was delighted to see that Simon Winchester has a new book coming…
My notions of art were formed during high school. Three years of art history as part of a core of humanities classes made me something of an art snob. We memorized paintings and artists the way chemistry students memorize elements and atomic weights. It took decades to shake the snobbery, decades to go from “beauty…
One of the traits that made Isaac Asimov a great explainer was his ability to start at the very beginning and tell a good story. The more complex a topic, the more important it is to begin with the basics and work your way up. Once asked to write a book on black holes, Isaac Asimov started…