Odds are that most of us had someone in our lives while growing up who influenced us. We probably didn’t truly appreciate this fact until we aged. I didn’t have to go far to find the first person who made me feel very special. It was our neighbor Trudy. The houses on our street are…

It was a unique week in my training life. I was away for four nights in hotels training for my new job selling residential rooftop solar installations, and so I had a rare opportunity: work out like nuts without any effect on my working life. The great thing about training in hotels is that you…

Remember when Stephen Colbert was really funny on Comedy Central for nine years while pretending to be an egotistical ignorant right-wing pundit, and then he announced that he was moving to CBS to take over the Letterman show but wouldn’t be taking his eponymous character along with him, and for a few months we all…

  By Carolyn Lorié When you stumble across something purple in the forest, it’s hard not to stop in your tracks. At least it was for me on a recent hike in Thetford, when I came across three purple mushrooms. They stood about four inches tall, with saucer tops that were nearly black in the…

By Nathaniel Sillin When those first baby teeth start wobbling, you and the Tooth Fairy can combine forces to teach your kids about money. Visa conducts an annual Tooth Fairy survey, the most recent indicates that the average price of a lost tooth is $3.19 in 2015. That puts a full set of 20 departing…

By Dom Cioffi Günther Schabowski has died. While that news will undoubtedly leave most Americans wrestling with questions of why they should even care, for millions of people in Germany, he represents an epic paradigm shift in their history. East Germany (as you’ll remember from your history textbooks) constructed the Berlin Wall in 1961 in an attempt to halt the…

  By Todd McLeish As an avid birdwatcher for more than 30 years, I’ve long been familiar with the big picture of songbird migration. Tiny blackpoll warblers, for instance, fly 1,500 miles from southern New England to the Caribbean in a single two- or three-day flight across open water with nowhere to land if they…

This week, Halloween week, my birthday week, was a grand week. I am up to 13 days of skiing this year, and I hiked straight up Double Dipper and skied every day. My inning schedule went out the window, but sneaker spiking up the mountain every day has me in pretty great shape, I am…

By Daris Howard While we were traveling through Peru, our university group spent many hours studying old churches, archeological digs, and ancient artifacts. But the thing I loved most was to see how common people lived, especially while traveling through Ollantaytambo in the sacred valley of the Inca. There I learned some very interesting traditions.…

It was nearly three years ago that the journalist Farhad Manjoo published the seminal Slate article “This Is the Greatest Hoodie Ever Made: How American Giant created the best sweatshirt known to man”—still surely the most influential and frequently cited work in the annals of hoodie journalism and the main catalyst for the popularity of…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week's Horoscopes are coming out under a Void-of-Course Cancer Moon, with aspects that include Mercury's entrance into the sign of the Scorpion, along with a conjunction between Venus and Mars at the 23rd and 24th Degrees of Virgo. As far as that goes, it's a sign…

By Joe Rankin Harry Potter rode one during the Quidditch matches at Hogwarts. The Wicked Witch of the West zipped around on one in the Wizard of Oz. We’re talking, of course, about witch’s brooms. No one knows exactly why witches were associated with with flying brooms. But the trope is remarkably persistent. The witch…

By Brady Crain The mountains looked inverted due to the refractive effects of an atmospheric thermocline. This happens when a layer of warm air slides over a layer of cold air. When I went up the chairlift I moved through different refractive “interpretations” of the far off mountains, which finally start to recede as you…

With Halloween right around the corner it’s fun to think about what that holiday was like back in the 50s and 60s–the time of my youth. "Back in the day” it was very unusual to see kids trick-or-treating any place but in their own neighborhood. It was a rare sight if a carload of kids…

As an actual male fan of the writer/director/actress Lena Dunham, I subscribed to her new email newsletter—called “Lenny”—almost as soon as I heard about it. Dunham’s fame stems from having created the HBO program “Girls,” a critically acclaimed but only marginally popular sitcom that nevertheless serves as one of the primary totems of Millennial culture.…