The letters we write can spell the difference between making and missing an important sale, between landing and losing a job, between a yes and a no from the girl or boy of our dreams. A neighbor of mine recently wrote to two contractors for bids on a concrete driveway. Here’s the beginning of one […]
How many people can the earth hold? Will birth and death rates continue to 1 decline? Can food production keep pace with population growth? Can technology I supplement or replace today’s resources? What are the long-term effects of pollution 1 on health, climate, and farm production? Debate over such issues has spawned I many volumes, […]
A very old lady who had devoted her life to pioneer work in education once told about a dangerous illness she had suffered in her middle years. She lay hovering between life and death, in the twilight of half-surrender, when she overheard two of her co-workers talking just outside her hospital room. “If we could […]
Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? Everyone knows the answer: they both weigh the same. An interesting point, however, is what sort of image popped into your head when you read those words. One person who answered this question saw, distinctly, a pair of scales with a cube of […]
For most of us, love is the most absorbing subject in existence. There is an enormous range of meanings in this one little word: motherly love and self-love, fatherly love and children’s love fc their parents; there is brotherly love and there is the love of one’s home and one’s country; there is love of […]
Why does a gorilla beat its chest? It depends on the gorilla – and on the situation. In some instances, the flamboyant and intimidating gesture may be just what it seems: a warning to keep away. When truly aroused, the leader of the gorilla troop rises and drums his chest rapidly, palms open and slightly […]
Everybody knows that Santa Claus lives somewhere near the North Pole where a carpet of snow covers the mountains and the amazing Northern Lights shine brightly in the Arctic night. It has generally been assumed that he settled there because of all that snow for his reindeer and sleigh, but the real reason he put […]
In 1960, an American psychiatrist named William Dement published experiments dealing with the recording of eye-movements during sleep. He showed that the average individual’s sleep cycle is punctuated with peculiar bursts of eye- movement, some drifting and slow, others jerky and rapid. People woken during these periods of eye-movement generally reported that they had been […]
All around the world, it seems to be true that people prefer mysterious explanations to simple explanations. If someone is killed in a car crash, for example, many people say it was caused by fate, rather than by poor driving or bad road conditions. In many countries, a profitable business has developed around the subject […]
In 1850, during the Gold Rush, a twenty-year-old immigrant from Bavaria named Levi Strauss stepped off the boat in San Francisco. He had with him a special cloth called Serge de Nimes, which would later be called denim in America. Levi Strauss hoped to sell the denim as material to make tents and covers for […]