A Doll Comes To Visit

You are a fifth-grade girl who comes home from school to find a doll on your front porch. The doll looks like you, is dressed like you, and there is something about the eyes. Who left it? Why is it here? And what makes this doll so special?

Read More

With a Little Help From My Friend

Jim Jenkins is an ace detective who solves the most difficult crimes. Yet he always works alone. Or does he?

Read More

The Boy Who Could Wiggle His Ears

Learning how to wiggle your ears is really hard. But you can do it if you keep trying. And if you learn to keep trying, no problem is too big. So if you can wiggle your ears, you can do anything!

Read More

What is the Maximum Human Lifespan?

The current record for human longevity is 122 years, held by Jean Louise Calment who died in 1997. Living to age 100 is quite an achievement, and only a handful become super-agers at 110. So has the maximum human lifespan been reached? Some think we may still have a ways to go. A team lead by

Read More

Helping Government Spend Your Money

When paying property taxes, how many property owners have wondered “I wish I could tell the city/county/township how I want this money spent”?   Now there is a way — participatory budgeting. First tried in 1989 in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, with participatory budgeting ordinary citizens have a say in how public money

Read More

Are You Lying?

The world runs so much better on trust. Unfortunately, according to a 1990s study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the average human tells up to two lies a day, Yet try as we might, no one can tell for sure when someone is lying. Not that we haven’t tried. Psychologist William Moulton Marston,

Read More

Longevity and the Brain

“Your brain’s health may be the most powerful indicator of how long you will live.” I’m at the age where an article about longevity really gets my attention. So the National Geographic piece “How to take better care of your aging brain” by Michael S. Sweeney really caught my eye (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/longevity-life-brain-care-health-age?). The article’s conclusion is

Read More

Poem: Why Did It

From the “I Wish I’d Written That” department, I thought this was funny. From the Poetry Foundation: “William J. Harris is an emeritus professor of American literature, African American literature, creative writing, and jazz studies. He taught at the University of Kansas, Pennsylvania State University, and Cornell University, among other universities. He lives in Brooklyn,

Read More

Changing Politics With The Dignity Index

“Are you frustrated by the hate and negativity? You’re not alone. That’s why we developed The Dignity Index, an eight-point scale that scores speech on its power to unite or divide.” We have a problem. In the past five years, threats against members of Congress have increased ten times. According to Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at

Read More

The Evils of Stupidity

I’ve always thought Congress would do a lot of good if it would simply make stupid behavior illegal. In that spirit, have you ever heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and dissident during the Nazi era who, when viewing what was happening around him, decided that stupidity is worse than evil. Think

Read More

Escaping in Plain Sight

I’ve always claimed so much of our past never makes it into the history books. This is especially true for stories about slavery. This being Black History Month, a recently published book gives another example of the ingenuity of slaves. William and Ellen Craft were a married couple, enslaved in Georgia but determined to escape

Read More