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I will confess that watching TV for eight straight hours would not be my own choice for a Big Day (though we did do it once – in our defense, it was during Covid). But I appreciate that someone thought up Frozen Frenzy, and made it happen – yesterday. As a result, a particular kind…

I love stories of how a single meeting between geniuses produced a Cambrian explosion of new art. A classic example involves authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, whose long walk down the leafy paths of Oxford one day in the fall of 1931 spawned both The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) and The Chronicles of…

That pointed phrase, coined by the children’s book author Denise Brennan-Nelson, has been poached by motivational speakers, financial advisors and shoe salesman (looking at you, Phil Knight), to the point where it’s been blunted like a dum-dum bullet. But the original source remains a modern classic. In the book, three-year-old Max keeps begging Grandpa and…

Awhile back the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer was having a convo with the person who might be my favourite podcaster, Randy Cohen. Safran Foer mentioned that he is a collector of “negative artifacts.” Cohen was curious: Do tell. “A negative artifact,” Safran Foer said, “commemorates something that didn’t happen.” The term, he explained, comes from…

Many people think it’s high time we sent a poet into space. Up there they would deploy their antennae and capture, in high fidelity, that most precious of commodities we’re running so low on back on Earth: wonder. Until that day, we’ll have to be content with Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s slim and meticulous novel, which…

At some level, this whole One Big Day project circles around the abstract concept of The Perfect Day. If such a thing were possible, what might it look like? The question might make more sense if we were sheep. Presumably, sheep would all wish for the same sort of thing out of a day (freedom…

Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, the unofficial World’s Most Positive Human, revealed in a recent conversation with Tim Ferriss that he is a ferociously dedicated diary-keeper. Every night, round about midnight, he faithfully jots down notes — just what has shaken out from the day. He has made it his mission to encourage everyone to do this.…

AP photo Cory Booker once dreamed of playing pro football, and it showed this week, in the sheer athleticism of his speech on the floor of the US Senate. Technically, the New Jersey Democrat’s 25-hour-long stemwinder wasn’t a “filibuster” – that term usually implies gassing on in the Senate in order to delay or defeat…

Not long ago the economist Tyler Cowan posed a cheeky question on his blog. “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”  Most of us probably don’t have a good answer. In our jobs, we don’t practice skills the way musicians or athletes do. We don’t “train.” But…

image: Jaroslav Devia for Unsplash * Oliver Burkeman, the former Guardian columnist, once devoted an entire day to mimicking the rituals of famous artists and scientists. He got up at 5:30, a la Hemingway; sat around naked in the morning, a la Ben Franklin; downed a cocktail at noon, a la V.S. Pritchett; gulped strong…