Captain Refused to Acknowledge He Was Lost

On September 3, 1989, Varig Airlines Flight 254 was at Brazil's Maraba Airport preparing for takeoff. Under normal circumstances the hop to nearby ...

Benjamin Franklin's Lesson on Humility from Cotton Mather

Benjamin Franklin vividly remembered a visit he made as a young man to see the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather and the life lesson learned. Franklin recalled: ...

Courtney Love Must Stand in Line

Rock star Courtney Love isn't used to waiting in line. She's used to the fame that came with her marriage to mega-star Curt Cobaine of the rock ...

Firefighter Red Adair on Hell

Paul "Red" Adair was the oil field firefighter first made famous by a 1968 John Wayne movie The Hellfighters. After the first Gulf War, he led ...

C. S. Lewis on God's Will

"There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your ...

A Case Study in Ruthless Ambition

For a picture of ruthless ambition, you could look no further than Richard Owen, the gifted scientist who coined the term dinosaur in 1841. Owen wrote ...

Saddam Hussein's Humiliation

Newsweek provided this description of the dethroned Saddam Hussein:

In a part of the world where pride and dignity mean everything, the images were clearly ...

Ego in Charge

Ashleigh Brilliant, that odd vestige of the seventies who scribbled his offbeat humor on hippie postcards, once penned: "All I ask of life is a constant ...

John Nash on Escapism

"Madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better. In madness, I thought I was the most important ...

Here Only By Grace

After worrying for half an hour that we wouldn't get on an overbooked flight, my wife and I were summoned to the check-in desk. A smiling agent whispered ...