What you do depends on what you see. Change your perspective, and you change your life.
Know what the best-selling self-help books on Amazon are right now? A Hollywood celebrity, an internet celebrity, two books on stoicism, a book by an alt-right anti-feminist, a book on crystal healing and Dale Carnegie, who seems to be perpetually there. Plus, a bunch more not unlike those.
Self help books are a bit like fashion. There’s trends and fads.
Ideas, thoughts and concepts become popular for a while, and then slowly fade away, as if they’re moving over for the next wave of self help ideas and authors in an endless parade of how broken we are.
Mostly, they…
Sexually abused at age six, death robbed her of all but her abusers. Poor Virginia, she just isn’t right in the head.
I don’t suppose one can fill their pockets with rocks and walk into a river and be entirely sane. Mad, we whisper. She was mad. But a brilliant writer, as though madness and creativity are somehow and tragically connected.
It’s a story we love to spin, isn’t it? A tale of madness and creativity intricately intertwined, as though madness is the price paid for creative brilliance. It lets us nevermind anything else that might factor in to shape a human life.
She was brutally sexually abused at age six.
At thirteen, she was still being sexually abused when her mother…
The Hollywood movie star who changed the rules of divorce
When Elizabeth Luxford found out her husband James had another wife, she marched down to the Court of Assistants in the Massachusetts Bay Puritan Colony and got the first divorce in America.
They fined him 100 pounds, gave all his property to Elizabeth, and threw his butt in the stocks. When he was released, they sent him back to England.
That was December, 1639. The second divorce was 3 years later when Anne Clarke petitioned for divorce in 1643. She’d married her husband, Denis and they had two kids. Then he moved in with another woman and had two kids…
Cool stuff I learned to do with plugins. Thought I’d share.
When I was a kid, my uncle used to do magic. The best was when he’d pull coins out of our ears.
He’d open his hands and make a big production of turning his pockets inside out so we could be sure he wasn’t hiding coins.
Then he’d wave his hands and voila — he’d pull coins out of our ears.
He’d look at Mom with a mock frown and ask why there’s coins growing in our ears. We’d laugh and ask how he did it but he wouldn’t tell.
He’d just wink and say magic.
Sometimes, that’s how I…
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
When Albert Einstein was born, his mother took one look at him and started to cry. “His poor head,” she wailed, “His poor big head.” At birth, his head was larger than normal for a newborn. It was March 14, 1879
3.14. Known as Pi Day. How apropos that would turn out to be.
Einstein did not speak as a toddler
The smartest tool for writers in decades and it does podcasts, too
Yesterday, Substack emailed to say they’ve updated how their stats work. Writers can now see how readers are engaging with their writing in a visual medium that makes it easy to wrap your head around.
So I logged in to see how it works. Omg, you guys, it’s gold stars. lol.
But not like the rest of the internet does gold stars, because they turned it around backwards and it’s freaking brilliant.
But first — what the heck is Substack?
Substack is what you’d get if Medium and Mailchimp had a child. Plus, a little more because it’s the gifted child.
How one man single-handedly ruined the self-growth industry.
Sam Smiles was kind of a failure in his youth, at least by his own criteria. Opposite of the Midas touch, it seemed everything he touched failed.
He was schooled in medicine, but his medical practice failed so badly, he abandoned it and became an editor at a local paper. When that didn’t get him the upward progress he wanted, he went into railroad administration.
When he left the railroad after a decade or so, he thought he should team up and go into business with a partner.
He joined several cooperative business ventures, but they all failed because of…
The hilarious irony of the free headline analyzer
Headlines are like a mosquito in the room on an otherwise lovely summer night. I really just want to nail that sucker, but I mostly miss.
Some people (me) sometimes debate whether headlines even matter. After all, some of the best writers suck at titles. I don’t read them for their titles. I read them because I know I like their writing.
Which is a lovely warm and fuzzy feeling, but does nothing to get new readers. Because new readers don’t know they like my writing yet. Or yours.
So yes, headlines do matter. Especially if you want to grow…
Men didn’t help with the housework back then, either
Ah, Victorian women. So delicate and genteel in their long, feminine gowns with cinched waists and petticoats. Prim and polite, morning to night. Right?
Well, no. Apparently not, as one magazine discovered when some man thought it was a good idea to ask single women why they’re not married.
I don’t say “some man” in a feminist snark manner. The editor of said magazine was George Newnes, Sherlock Holmes fan and son of a Congregational minister.
Despite that he was not born into a publishing family, Newnes inaugurated what would become known as “New Journalism,” an editorial strategy that included…
Plummeting through space, it began a poignant story we only discovered centuries after the Boy King died
King Tut was a child king who ascended to the throne at age nine and was dead by nineteen, but for centuries we knew hardly anything about him other than a few details. We didn’t even know how he died.
Historians knew he took power around 1332 B.C. and ruled for a decade until he died at nineteen. But we didn’t know much more than that.
Until British archaeologist Howard Carter stumbled upon his tomb.
Or rather, his water-boy did.
An accidental find in the valley of thieves…
Carter had been searching for the tomb for five years and his patron was about to withdraw funding. Just in…
