On Distractions
Widower Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Edith Galt in 1915. The President’s doorkeeper summarized the situation tersely:
“She’s a looker; he’s a goner.”
Similar Posts
A Truly Amazing Story of Living with ALS
ByadminHere is a link to a story about a very good friend of mine, Scott Mackler, who I wrote about in my book You’re Stronger Than You Think. Scott was diagnosed with ALS almost 15 years ago. His first symptoms were when he lost grip of a tennis racket, playing against me. And I thought…
Predicting Adaptation to Calamity and Disability
ByadminPeople often show an amazing ability to emotionally recover from difficult circumstances. I devoted my second book, You’re Stronger Than You Think, to this topic. Now comes some really cool research, showing that people’s ability to bounce back from adversity depends, not all that surprisingly, on their underlying personality traits. Although this result is not…
What Drives Me Crazy about the Popularity of Behavioral Economics
ByadminA recent article in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, my former hometown newspaper, made the kind of statement that is all too common in popular reporting on behavioral economics: “The idea that we humans are not that smart comes from behavioral economics.” Really? Behavioral economics discovered stupidity? Irrationality? The limits of human intelligence? That is…
Life before Anesthesia
ByadminThis 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…
Northern Bias in Poetry ?
ByadminUntil 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…
Neither Intimidated by God or Napoleon
ByadminWhen people mention Bayes’ Theorem, the cornerstone of much of modern probability thinking, most do not realize that much of the thinking to develop this theorem was done by Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French astronomer and mathematician. As if his work on that theorem was not enough to make him one of my heroes, I recently…