Research has found that, to put it bluntly, expressing gratitude to someone who helps you keeps them interested and invested in having a relationship with you over the long haul. It makes their time, effort, and inconvenience seem worth it. In the same vein, there is nothing quite like ingratitude to sour an otherwise happy … Continue reading Expressing Gratitude the Right Way
A week ago, singer/songwriter Marian Call asked her followers via Twitter: "What were your first 7 jobs?" She relayed her own experience in providing the first answer: babysitting, janitorial, slinging coffee, yard work, writing radio news, voice-overs, data-entry/secretarial. Before long, the hashtag #FirstSevenJobs began trending. Celebrities, entrepreneurs, CEOs--and everybody else--soon joined in. A quick search … Continue reading My #FirstSevenJobs
"Quietly, amid the carnage and chaos in the daily news, 2016 is shaping up as a good year for peace in the world." - Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker "If you can tear your attention away from the 24 hour news cycle, you’ll be astonished to hear that we are experiencing one of the least discussed, … Continue reading 2016 – the Most Peaceful Year Ever?
Long live Joey Chestnut! Long live Kobayashi! Who would have thought that being a competitive eater may offer some longevity benefits. The Wall Street Journal had a story earlier this week that the force of a man’s bite at age 70 may be a marker of his longevity. According to a study in the Journal … Continue reading Hot Dog Eating Champs May Outlive All of Us!
My free three-month trial to Spotify is nearing its end, and I must admit I've loved it. In fact, I plan to upgrade to a Family plan once the trial period is over. One of the features of Spotify that I like is this sense of instant gratification. If there is a song that pops … Continue reading Reliving My Favorite Broadway Plays Thanks to Spotify
This is the 72nd in a collection of newspaper ads written by Harry Gray, then CEO of United Technologies, that appeared in the Wall Street Journal from the late 1970s through the early 1980s. Here is the text from that ad. In just 200 years, your country, through freedom and hard work, has changed the … Continue reading Team U.S.A. – You’re the Finest
The NFL teams just began their full training camps a little over a week ago, and already there are a significant number of injury reports coming out of the camps. According to an injury report at ESPN, there are 171 reported injuries, Â an average a little over five injuries per team. It's hard to get … Continue reading So Many Injuries – and These Are Professional Athletes!
51 years ago today, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark piece of federal legislation  that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act secured voting rights … Continue reading 51 Years Later, and We Still Don’t Have it Right
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the night the Borden family went to a baseball game. It was an unremarkable event; in fact, the blog wasn't really about the baseball game. The blog was about clickbait. I wanted to see if I could come up with an enticing headline just to get people … Continue reading Based on Facebook’s Reaction, Mark Zuckerberg Must Read My Blog
I am a big fan of Dan Ariely and his work in the area of behavioral economics. I've read two of his books, The Upside of Irrationality and Predictably Irrational, and can highly recommend both. As one reviewer notes, "Dan Ariely is a genius at understanding human behavior: no economist does a better job of uncovering … Continue reading Stressing Out at the Urinal
Borden's Blather 