In the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, marathon runner John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania finished last. But there’s quite a bit more to his story. Akhwari was one of the world’s best long distance runners. He had never trained at high altitudes, however, such as those in central Mexico. Several miles into the marathon, Akhwari began to cramp. Then, approaching the… Read more »
How often does the average person touch his or her cell phone? The answer seems to be “more than you can possibly imagine.” According to the research firm dscout, typical owners of mobile devices touch their phones 2,617 times a day. And we’re not even talking about so-called extreme users. The most serious addicts, who represented the top 10% of… Read more »
“We are not ourselves by ourselves.” (Eugene Peterson) Most of us, at one time or another, cherish a dream of making a difference – of helping to transform this broken world. All too often such dreams die. We may run out of resources or resolve or sufficient discipline to stay on the path. But if we are blessed with the… Read more »
Great cities should have an iconic centerpiece. That, at least, was the thinking of the planning committee for the Paris Centennial in 1889 – a World’s Fair that would coincide with the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. The planners were biased. They wanted something really big. At that time the Washington Monument in D.C., standing at 500 feet or… Read more »
Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in 1605 by Miguel de Cervantes, is one of those wonderful books we all learned about in high school, but most of us have not yet read. It is widely considered one of the finest novels ever written. Only the Bible has been translated into more languages. In a nutshell, Don… Read more »
Tom Brady has been very good for a very long time. As the Tampa Bay Buccaneer quarterback prepares for his tenth Super Bowl this Sunday, I am reminded of one of the epic playoff matches between Brady’s New England Patriots and my hometown Indianapolis Colts. Leading up to the January 21, 2007, AFC Championship game, the Patriots had routinely conquered… Read more »
If 2021 is the year you decided to read through the Old or New Testaments, you probably ran into a few dry spots in the month of January. We’re talking about genealogies. Alongside a handful of major characters, the opening chapters of Genesis introduce us to dozens of obscure individuals with hard-to-pronounce names. These are folks who appeared on the… Read more »
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have the power to vote someone out of your community? Once, long ago, there was a city where that happened on a regular basis. About four centuries before Christ, the citizens of Athens annually scheduled four open-air Assembly meetings where they could debate, discuss, and vote on matters of interest… Read more »
The first one mysteriously appeared in a field in southern England in September 1976. Observers were amazed. What had produced the enormous “crop circle” thatseemed to come from nowhere? More circles followed. Soon the English countryside was dotted with increasingly elaborate geometric designs and symbols, all sculpted in fields of wheat, barley, and corn. Then the phenomenon went global. At… Read more »
James Cameron’s movie version of the sinking the Titanic is exceptional in that it focuses on a part of the Titanic story that every previous film had ignored: the reality of the hundreds of passengers who were still alive and screaming for help in the freezing waters of the Atlantic long after the ship had disappeared. The raw numbers of… Read more »
