Messenger of Sympathy and Love Servant of Parted Friends Consoler of the Lonely Bond of the Scattered Family Enlarger of the Common Life Carrier of News and Knowledge Instrument of Trade and Industry Promoter of Mutual Acquaintance Of Peace and of Goodwill Among Men and Nations. A business consultant once passed around copies of the
We lived through the ‘80s. We lived through the ‘90s. We lived through the ‘00s. We lived through the ‘10s. And we’ve lived through March. Most of us, that is, have lived. I’m still coming to terms with what is happening. It’s like grief. I go about my day, getting absorbed in work, or a book
This Princess and Prince Party is sure to be canceled. I'm delighted to report that the Train Campaign projects were included in the governor's bond bill last week, and the bills I filed by petition (a unique Massachusetts citizen right) have been favorably reported on. Read about A Great Week for Train Advocates in
My son Tom works in healthcare finance, and has lived in China since graduating from college. He was quarantined in Lanzhou during the 2009 swine flu epidemic, and now he's experiencing the semi-quarantine of 2020. In fact, I expected to be there right now and was looking forward to time with him and his wife when
Chinese food, anyone? I'll be co-presenting a program about gastrodiplomacy at Schwarzman College in Beijing next month, and I am looking for stories to share, from history as well as personal experience. Schwarzman College 苏世民书院 is a residential college at Tsinghua University. Schwarzman scholarships are modeled on the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford. The one-year MA program,
"Show, don't tell." This is common advice for writers, and for marketers, too. I found myself thinking about "showing" this week as I made a mental list of the enlightening projects I have worked on. The Encyclopedia of Leadership is one. Here's an article from it on "Tyrannical Leadership" that is all too relevant right now. Tyranny, as
In what one scholar called “the literary event of the decade,” on 2 January 2020, Princeton University Library opened up more than 1,100 letters that the Nobel-Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot wrote over the course of three decades to an American speech professor and amateur actress named Emily Hale. The day became even more newsworthy
When we published the Encyclopedia of Sustainability in 2012, a librarian wrote, “That goes against the spirit of sustainability.” I got a similar response this week, so I want to explain why we publish in print and online, and why online is not “green.” An ebook probably kills more trees through deforestation than an equivalent print book, and
The term “happy place” is not in the Oxford English Dictionary (though “happy slap” is), but I’ve been hearing the term a lot. There’s even a new shop in Great Barrington called HappyPlace Berkshires. I first dismissed it as therapeutic slang, but discovered that the concept actually goes back to the Greeks: a utopia is a
I went to a talk by a cookbook author who said she’d figured out a system for efficient home cooking: big pots of beans and soup, dishes that could be frozen and reheated. The concepts would have been obvious to any old-fashioned cook, and they are good, practical concepts. But her specific advice was so complicated
