Study of How Long We'll Wait

When Timex (the watch company) asked people how long they would wait before taking action in a wide variety of situations, researchers discovered that ...

You Have a Shorter Attention Span than a Goldfish

A study by Microsoft of 2,000 consumers discovered some interesting things. The first is that the average human attention span has gone down. In 2000 ...

The Need to Fill Our Bicycle Tires (Souls)

Editor's Note: Tell this illustration as a story or as a prop illustration by using an actual bicycle or a bike tire.

On a recent bike trip it wasn't ...

Pictures on Smartphones Can't Replace Real Life

For more than five hundred years the city of Florence has marked Easter with a wild ceremony called (in English) "the explosion of the cart." ...

Reader's Digest Condensed Version of the Bible

In 1982, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the world's most widely-read book—the Bible. The project, led by John E. Walsh, ...

Musical Magic Ruined by Cell Phone

On a warm late-August Tuesday evening, music critic David Hajdu wandered into a Greenwich Village (New York City) jazz hotspot called the Vanguard. He ...

Ancient Well Fed By Underground Springs

Once upon a time there was an old well that stood outside the front door of a family farmhouse in New Hampshire. The water from the well was remarkably ...

Our Niagara Falls-Like Flood of Data

We are in the age of gargantuan numbers, truly instant information, ceaselessly hyperactive social media, when the World Wide Web has become a flood-driven ...

The Benefits of Ignoring Notifications

How many times do you check Twitter? What about Facebook? Don't forget Instagram. Like Pavlov's dog we are being trained with beeps, buzzes, and ...

Doctor Identifies New Epidemic—Busyness

Dr. Susan Koven practices internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. In a Boston Globe column, she wrote:

In the past few years, I've observed ...