The other night, I was trying to explain to my seven year old twin boys what an oxymoron is. It's when you have a combination of contradictory words that just don't seem to go together. I tried to illustrate with some examples like, “jumbo shrimp”, “awfully nice” and “pretty … [Read more...]

I have elevated social interaction to an art form. Painful Impressionist. Nowhere is that more apparent than my stilted conversations with macho guys, particularly the fathers of my children’s friends. When I come to pick up my kids at their houses, they blink at me as if I am … [Read more...]

The same scientist who developed the concept of “net carbs”, on which the popular but defunct Atkins diet was based, now has a new discovery, which no doubt will form the basis of the next fad diet. His revolutionary finding is the phenomenon of “gross burn”, or, to use the … [Read more...]

This week, my wife and three kids made the six-hour trek to her parents’ house in Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a glorious annual event for them, having fun, eating ice cream, and riding the island’s famous carousel -- a vacation offer too good to refuse. But this story is not about … [Read more...]

40,000 years of self-improvement, and counting So much of what people do today can be traced back to some evolutionary pre-programming. How much really has changed over the millennia? Tens of thousands of years ago, cavewomen tended to the children, gathered knickknacks, and … [Read more...]