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.…

(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…

(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…

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…

Boop! The email that appears in your in-box activates brain synapses you thought had rusted shut. It’s from an old university friend you haven’t seen in decades. She found you online and, on an impulse, reached out. Turns out she’s coming through your town next month and wondering if you’re free to meet. Are you?…

“Truly a night to remember!” barks the record producer Sam Phillips, round midnight, as he peers across the sound room at the never-to-be repeated convergence: four supernova stars in the same room at Sun Studio in Memphis, winding up an impromptu jam session. The date: December 4, 1956. The stars: Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins,…

One Big Day is, by design, a sunny can-do project. Implicit is the idea that we might — really should—periodically engineer a single day where we try to make something happen. Something meaningful and lovely and maybe a little bit life-changing. But Big Days also just occur on their own. And sometimes they’re very un-lovely,…

I’m not gonna lie: the American fiction writer William Gass—best known for avante-garde novels like In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and one of the high priests of postmodernism—always eluded my tastes. (“O William Gass, you’re a pain in the ass…”) Nevertheless, I find a peculiar choice he made one day circa…

Doug Eaton, of Oklahoma City, used to be an insurance executive once upon a time. He was other things before and he has been other things since. But all you need to know about him, for the purposes of this story, is how he spent his 65th birthday. As the milestone approached, Doug found himself…

There is a very fine Canadian fiction writer named Jaspreet Singh. A couple decades ago, when he was in his early thirties, he was a chemical engineer working as a senior researcher at a multinational paper company in Wisconsin. It was the kind of job that promises a life of high status, income and job…