Fun Facts on Tea

From Delta Airlines’Sky magazine of May 2018: Approximately 92,000 pounds of tea were destroyed during the Boston Tea Party, the present-day value of which has been estimated to be around $1 million. Herbal teas aren’t actually teas but tisanes: infusions of seeds, berries, flowers, leaves and/or roots. When his hot tea didn’t sell at the […]

Harvey Weinstein, Complicity, and the Rules of the Game in Hollywood

Stephen Galloway of The Hollywood Reporter wonders if the Harvey Weinstein trial will shame Hollywood: Disgraced movie producer and accused serial sexual predator Harvey Weinstein is facing charges that could send him to prison for life, but his lawyers will try to put his many enablers and Hollywood itself on trial-and the results may be […]

Tolerance and the Homo Sapiens

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more […]

Overthinking and Its Adverse Consequences

From Sonja Lyubomirsky’s excellent book The How of Happiness, Many of us believe that when we feel down, we should try to focus inwardly and evaluate our feelings and our situation in order to attain self-insight and find solutions that might ultimately resolve our problems and relieve unhappiness. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, I, and others have compiled […]

Becoming Culinarily Awake

Filmmaker Brian Koppelman in a podcast interview with television personality Alton Brown (of the Good Eats and Iron Chef America fame:) Off on the edge of this town was a gypsy guy that lived in a hut and he had a little wood fire oven and three little busted up tables outside his place. You […]

Anthony Trollope Writing in Trains

The English novelist and Post Office bureaucrat Anthony Trollope wrote over 50 books. He declared that he wrote only for money, and composed much of his writing on trains while traveling to examine rural post offices. He writes in An Autobiography (1883,) On the 15th September 1841, I landed in Dublin, without an acquaintance in […]

Carrying Religious Vendetta Across Generations

Richard Dawkins writes in A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only […]

Success is Not Final, Failure is Not Fatal

Investor Josh Brown writes that in 1923, nine of the most successful U.S. businessmen met in Chicago. Within 25 years, all of these great men had met a horrific end to their careers or their lives. The president of the largest steel company, Charles Schwab, died a bankrupt man; the president of the largest utility […]

Humility Begins with Self-honesty

Wayne Teasdale writes in The Mystic Hours, There is no possibility of a mature spiritual life without humility. Nor is it possible to be a successful human being without it. Humility is also, most fundamentally, a relationship of truth with ourselves. Humility begins with self-honesty about our actions, attitudes, and speech. It compels us to […]

The Genius of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

T. S. Eliot writes in his Introduction to Tennyson’s Poems, Tennyson is a great poet, for reasons that are perfectly clear. He had three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety, and complete competence. We therefore cannot appreciate his works unless we read a good deal of it. We […]