Let’s say you need someone to help you do something really important. Would you settle for someone who just Googled it? Would you look for someone with the right professional license? Or would you hold out for the guy who literally wrote the book on whatever it is you need to do? Expertise doesn’t guarantee success: great […]

Back in 1621, a group of hardy Pilgrims sat down for a three-day festival of thanksgiving to celebrate surviving plague, starvation, cold, scurvy, Indian attack, and all the other obstacles that made life in the “new world” so delightful. They feasted on game birds, flint corn, venison, eels, shellfish, and native vegetables including beans, turnips, […]

Next week brings us the most quintessentially American of all holidays. It’s the one we wait for all year, the one that truly captures those ideals that bind us together as a nation, and the one that bridges the cultural and political gaps that threaten to tear us apart. We’re talking, of course, about Black […]

On Monday, Veterans Day commemorated those brave and selfless Americans who’ve served in our military. We honor them with History Channel specials, parades, and one-day-only sales on chicken sandwiches and big-screen TVs. Occasionally, we even let the occasion guilt us into trying to do a better job of taking care of them in more tangible […]

Turn the dial on the Wayback Machine to 1849, and join us in California, where “there’s gold in them thar hills!” Two kinds of people are getting fabulously rich. Obviously, there are the prospectors, grabbing their shovels and racing for the latest strike. Then there are the shovel sellers getting rich on the prospector’s dreams. […]

Twenty years ago, sci-fi fans geeked out to a new thriller called The Matrix following a dystopian vein established in Blade Runner, Total Recall, and The Terminator. It starred Keanu Reeves as “Neo” and Laurence Fishburne as “Morpheus”: freedom fighters in a world where machines have trapped humanity in a computer-generated dreamscape called the Matrix, to distract their minds while […]