It’s been more than 50 years since the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee’s only novel, until now. In a surprise announcement, a “new” work by Lee (about Scout Finch as an adult, and her aging father, Atticus) will be published by HarperCollins this July. Lee hasn’t been suffering from a half-century long writer’s block; nor, apparently, was the 88-year-old author holding out on us. The novel, Go Set A Watchman, was only recently discovered by Lee’s lawyer. The author – living with the debilitating effects of a 2007......
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What is your attitude toward mistakes? Well, recently researchers at IBM announced that they found two new kinds of industrial polymers that are strong, lightweight and crack-resistant, ideal for utilizing in several industries from aerospace to microelectronics. These discoveries could enable development of plastics that are easily recyclable (currently plastics are?notoriously difficult to recycle), creating far less plastic waste. Scientists had long assumed that all major types of plastics had already been discovered. But here’s the amazing thing: Jeannette M. Garcia, an IBM research chemist, found the new polymer by mistake! She......
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Imagine how you would feel if years of curiosity, perseverance, creativity, love of learning, and faith were rewarded with confirmation of everything you believed! Well, last week, a team of scientists announced that the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole detected gravitational waves that could be traced to a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, providing evidence to a theory about the universe’s expansion called Inflation. Stay with me now, as I am a lot like you. While I got an A+ in Astronomy for Poets at Columbia University......
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Most people have a deeply intuitive sense about what matters most to them.? Once they learn to trust that intuition?- itself no small feat?- the real challenge lies in figuring out where and how to pursue it, to obtain and to deepen it. While there’s no single answer, I’m increasingly convinced that whatever it is that matters most to each of us, there are some helpful principles regarding how and where we’re going to find it. While specific tools, practices and institutions are all crucially important to finding what matters most, in......
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“To boldly go where no man has gone before” is a phrase many of us know from the opening of Star Trek. The phrase actually originated in a 1958 White House booklet written to galvanize support for the space program in the wake of the Sputnik flight and captures one of the driving creative urges we human beings possess. We seek, quest, explore, and discover from the moment we are born. What we choose to pursue, how expansive our search, with whom we collaborate, how persistent we are to a great extent......
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Wait! Before you skip over this post because you may not believe in God, substitute a term that does fall into your beliefs: “awe,” “wonder,” “inexplicable beauty,” or “a moment of transcendence.”? Don’t let the words get in the way.? Now ask yourself: Where do you find those things, and where are you when they find you? It turns out that we often discover the transcendent in the most unexpected or idiosyncratic places. It can literally happen any place. That’s actually really promising – because if God (or whatever) can be there,......
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Columbus Day 2013 is officially observed Monday, October 14th, and like the old comedian Rodney Dangerfield used to say about himself, “it don’t get no respect” – at least not much, which is a shame.? While all but 3 states recognize this federal holiday, it has lost almost all significance to most Americans other than those of Italian descent who celebrate Christopher Columbus’ Italian heritage. That’s a shame, as there is much about the Columbus story to celebrate, whether we judge him to be a hero or a villain. There is plenty......
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