Courtesy | Unsplash Harper Lee never wanted to publish her “newest” short stories, but maybe she should have. HarperCollins released “The Land of Sweet Forever,” a collection of eight short stories and eight nonfiction pieces written by the late Harper Lee, for the first time last month. The stories, discovered in her New York City...
Memento Mori, “To This Favour,” by William Michael Harnett, 1879. Courtesy | Unsplash You will die. We like to ignore this inconvenient fact. The morbid and macabre are improper in pleasant conversation. Our language has more than 200 euphemisms for “die,” such as “pass away” and “bite the dust.” But despite our best efforts to...
Courtesy | Unsplash Imagine: Four men pull up to the Louvre Museum with two scooters and a ladder. They slice through the window into a glittering, gilded gallery and snatch France’s priceless crown jewels. They’re gone in less than seven minutes. This isn’t “Ocean’s Eleven.” It’s an October morning in Paris. After a year of...
Courtesy | Unsplash Researchers have pinpointed a phenomenon they call the “helper’s high,” which is a bit like a “runner’s high” except it doesn’t require excruciating suffering to attain. Allan Luks, the former executive director of the Institute for the Advancement of Health, wrote a book with Peggy Payne called “The Healing Power of Doing...
Courtesy | Unsplash Playing volleyball in high school is one of the best decisions I have ever made. My private school enrolled fewer than 200 students and the coach took whoever could fill the roster, including homeschooled students. Playing with that ragtag team taught me lessons in humility, strength, and the importance of teamwork and...