Upcoming web video chat thingamabob
Here are some details on a live web chat I’m having on Friday. Feel free to send in some fun questions.
Here are some details on a live web chat I’m having on Friday. Feel free to send in some fun questions.
Early in his book The Power Makers, Maury Klein does a fantastic job of explaining the importance that modern energy systems, like steam and electricity, played in human history: All the achievements of humanity down to about the eighteenth century were constrained by the inability to find more efficient ways to do things beyond the…
In a recent edition of the New Yorker, the magazine published a story by Dashiell Hammett and one of the paragraphs in that wonderful story nicely captures the way that waiting for something bad to happen can be worse than experiencing that bad thing. In the scene, a group of people stand on the sidewalk…
Until I moved to North Carolina, it never struck me as odd that people talk about “April showers bring May flowers.” That nice little bit of rhyming doesn’t make sense down here in the south. Which made me think: but what would this phrase look like in different parts of the country? Here are my…
“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.” —John Durham Peters (Click here to view comments)

“I just finished reading your book You’re Stronger than You Think and felt compelled to write you. I found it tremendously enriching from both a personal and professional point of view.”
That was the opening sentence from a recent e-mail I received from a complete stranger. Truth be told, it is impossible to get too many e-mails like this!
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This is how Fanny Burney described the mastectomy she received in 1811, a long time before effective anesthesia was available: I mounted, therefore, unbidden, the bed stead. When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries ––flesh – nerves – I needed no injunctions not to restrain my…