Big Trig Day

Sometimes it hits me: I’m kind of a bad parent. Not whipped-them-all-soundly-and-sent-them-to-bed bad, just … a bit lazy. Neglectful. Inattentive to the shifting emotional barometric pressure of youth. When the girls are quietly dealing with some issue, it’s almost always their mom who picks up on it and helps them past that pinch point, while…

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A day in your future life

(Photo: Patricia Prudente / Unsplash) Debbie Millman, a graphic artist and former head of AIGA, has an exercise she assigns her students at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She learned it from her mentor, Milton Glaser. It goes like this: Describe a day in your life 10 years from now. One whole…

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The all-nighter that changed global geopolitics

It’s an exaggeration to say Jeffrey Sachs sparked the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, ushering in the end of the Cold War, in a single day. But maybe not as much as you’d think. Sachs, a developmental economist, was reminiscing recently with an interviewer about how it all went down in summer of 1989.…

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Batkid lives on

(photo: Jeff Chiu, AP) The Make-A-Wish Foundation is a delivery system of epic Big Days to seriously ill kids. One day to live your dream: it’s a bittersweet gift, in the circumstances. But some recipients defy the odds, and live to savour the memory of a great adventure. That’s the case with Miles Scott, from…

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Weirdo for a Day: adventures in non-conformity

(photo: vecteezy) After the scale of the Nazi atrocities of World War II became known, a keen focus of experimental psychology in the West was this question: Are we all just sheep? How could so many people blindly follow orders, when their very souls must have been screaming objections? The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who would…

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Big Apollonian Day

The two sons of Zeus couldn’t have been more different. Apollo, god of the sun (not to mention music, poetry, plague and disease) was a logic freak. He prided himself on his rational thinking and sound reasoning. He was forever telling younger brother Dionysus not to touch his carefully ordered record collection — because the…

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Big Dionysian Day

Big Apollonian Day This is the second of a two-part post. The setup is explained in part one, Big Apollonian Day. * Sunday, May 14, 2023, 8am: Naxos, Greece As church bells gong, and waiters set up breakfast tables on patios on the beach, Mad and I jog through the narrow streets of the Chora,…

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Doing one thing over and over

In their quest for perfection, some film directors put their actors through a cosmic test of patience. David Fincher, best known for his Oscar-winning The Social Network, shot the opening scene of that picture 99 times. It’s not a record — that honour goes to Stanley Kubrick, who logged 148 takes of a scene from…

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