A long time ago there was a fox whose sister was getting married. The fox wanted to help her sister plan the wedding party. The fox had no tongue so she couldn’t make the special sound used to help celebrate the wedding. She decided to ask around for someone to loan her a tongue for [...]

MacArthur winner Sendhil Mullainathan uses the lens of behavioral economics to study a tricky set of social problems — those we know how to solve, but don’t. We know how to reduce child deaths due to diarrhea, how to prevent diabetes-related blindness and how to implement solar-cell technology … yet somehow, we don’t or can’t. [...]

Part 2 You don’t have to be crazy to live in Buenos Aires, but it helps! Hence a popular radio talk-show run by asylum inmates. Link to this post!

A girl in love asked her boyfriend. Girl: Tell me. Who do you love most in this world? Boy: You, of course! Girl: In your heart, what am I to you? Boy: The boy thought for a moment and looked intently in her eyes and said, “You are my rib. It was said that God [...]

Endings seem to lie in wait. Absorbed in our experience we forget that an ending might be approaching. Consequently, when the ending signals its arrival, we can feel ambushed. Perhaps there is an instinctive survival mechanism in us that distracts us from the inevitability of ending, thus enabling us to live in the present with [...]

Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world’s biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them. Link to this post!

MyWorld Entry: Somewhere in Northern Tanzania In this entry, Ibrahim Matukuta shows us the click Hadza tribe from of Northern Tanzania, one of the last remaining tribes of true hunter-gatherers left on the planet. Link to this post!

MyWorld Entry: Rhythm of child for Istanbul In this entry from Turkey, Mehmet Haciosmanoğlu overlays the accomplished drumming of a young boy he encounters on the street with shots of life in Istanbul Link to this post!

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It [...]

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.   J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. Text as delivered follows.  Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008 [...]