Columnist on the Complexity of Modern Life

Wall Street Journal columnist Joe Queenan recently (2016) made some funny comments on the complexity and information overload of modern life:

I bought ...

Americans Face a 'Choice Explosion'

A few years ago, a researcher asked 100 American and Japanese college students to take a piece of paper. On one side, they wrote down the decisions in ...

Leonardo da Vinci—How to Be Insatiably Curious

The human brain weighs three pounds. It is the size of a softball, and yet with it we have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute ...

Man Confuses God's Voice with Rink Manager

A guy goes ice fishing for the very first time. All of a sudden, he hears a voice. "There are no fish under the ice!" He ignores it and moves ...

Boy Can't See Glory at Art Gallery

I remember taking my youngest son to one of the national art galleries in Washington, D.C. As we made our approach, I was so excited about what we were ...

The President Can Text Everyone in the U.S.

The President of the U.S. has the power to push text messages to just about every smartphone in America, anytime he deems it necessary. Who knew? The ...

Learning Gratitude the Hard Way

Imagine you are in a small underground chamber, no bigger than a prison cell. The door is locked and the lights are switched out. It is not just dark; ...

'Generation deaf': Hearing Loss Among Millennials

Doctors warn that a steady onslaught of loud noise, particularly through ear buds, is damaging the hearing of a generation wired for sound, although they ...

Distracted People Miss Clown on Unicycle

As [one researcher has] described it, our brain blinds our mind to the unusual. For instance, in one study, researchers put a clown on a unicycle in the ...

Life Is Like Hitting a Knuckleball

Everything about baseball is predicated on precision and predictability. A .260 hitter might have a good or bad year, but eventually he will revert to ...