Blog

How important are mentors? Let’s just say that everyone I’ve ever met who was stuck in their life or career was severely under-mentored. In olden days, mentoring was probably more of an automatic process: you grew up working alongside your parents on the farm, or apprenticed with a craftsperson or local business owner. These days,…

This article reports on a German study in which 2 groups of students were asked to fill out a questionnaire. The questionnaires were all on the same topics – simple stuff like opening a bank account – but the questions were phrased either concretely or abstractly. Turns out the students who were given the abstract…

Thank you to Barack, those who worked on his behalf, and those who came before us and built the foundation, often at the cost of their freedom or lives.

Along with the triumph of Obama, yesterday’s election was also a triumph for the animals, as Americans voted for more compassion. California’s Proposition 2 passed with 62% of the vote, ensuring much more humane confinement and compassionate treatment for 20 million chickens, pigs, cows and other farmed animals in that state each year. This was…

A while back, the New York Times ran a interesting interview with Jim McCann, founder and CEO of 1-800Flowers.com . A lot of it was about the mistakes he made along the way, and how he rebounded. His conclusion: “If you look at highly successful people, they make the same number of mistakes as others,…

Sad to note George Carlin’s death. The thing I found interesting in his New York Times obit was how, back in the late 1960s, when he was already at the top of his profession, with guest spots on Ed Sullivan, bookings at top Las Vegas casinos, etc., Carlin bravely chucked it all to follow what…

Via Cute Overload (where else?), we present the antics of Shming the hedgehog and his adoring female entourage:

I’ve been saving these up for just the right Friday: Hell’s iPodA collection of entertainingly awful music videos, most of which seem to date from my youth (and, hence, don’t sound all that awful to me). The classics are all in here: Muskrat Love, Billy Don’t be a Hero, Honey, You Light Up My Life,…

Bravo to the college environmentalists in this wonderful New York Times article , who are not just exploring sustainable living for themselves, but modeling it for others with creativity and fun: “Lucas Brown, a junior at Oberlin College here, was still wet from the shower the other morning as he entered his score on the…