One Big Day Journal

How to measure out your life

brooke campbell / unsplash I’m often asked: Why Big Days and not, you know … something else. Big Hours. Or Big Months. Why this particular unit of time? Is there something especially significant, something magical, about the period of 24 hours? Are we Homo Diem creatures at our core? I have a few answers to…

The King of the Fells

New York Times photo. In early July, hundreds of “fell runners” attended the funeral of Joss Naylor, running eight miles up the valley from his home in Cumbria, England in his honour. Naylor, their quiet king, had died at age 88. Fells are what the Britons call hills and small mountains. Hoofing up and down…

Last Night in the diner at the end of the world

This week the NPR show This American Life rebroadcast a classic episode called “24 hours at the Golden Apple.” It’s set in a greasy spoon in Chicago, one of those always-open joints that becomes a neighbourhood’s centre of gravity. Working in shifts, the show’s producers and reporters went full-court press on the place, from 5am…

What does a good day look like?

Atul Gawande has changed the way he thinks about his job, and that has made all the difference to his impact on the world. He has helped change the way we think about health care at the end of life. The physician and author used to believe that a doctor’s obligation was to fight like…

The mayfly: patron bug of Carpe Diem

. “Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow— even today I am still arriving.” — Thich Nhat Hanh * Lila has a high-school teacher I’ve been a bit conflicted about. He teaches environmental science. There’s rarely any homework and the curriculum, a lot of times, seems to consist of going for walks in the woods.…

Do you want to experience your life, or remember it?

[greg rakozy photo] Here’s a conundrum that has emerged for me: Big Days that are fun to do — or useful to do—are not always interesting to write about. Imagine you’ve been working your butt off day and night. A Big Sleep Day to follow? Righteous! But nobody wants to hear about it. Makes me…

Couldn’t be stupider … that’s why it’s so smart

One Friday not long ago, it occurred to James Altucher that he ought to buy Greenland. To keep it safe. Because “the most northern country on the planet could be the most important for our survival.” James didn’t have the cash on hand, so he decided to crowdsource the purchase. He went to the bank…

The one night that cracked open a hundred years of solitude

(photo El Colombio; Marquez (c) and Rulfo (r)) In a recent issue of the New York Times Book Review, the writer and literature professor Valeria Luiselli served up a rapturous essay in praise of the great neglected Mexican novel Pedro Páramo, by the great neglected Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo. She opens with a shot of…

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…

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.…