Past Articles

If I were a sporting goods store that sold kayaks, I’d try to get as many people to borrow them and take them out for an afternoon as I could. I guarantee most people would return them and then want to own one for themselves.  Today we borrowed a friend’s […]

Like many of us, your mother probably told you when you were young that you should go outside and get some fresh air. This wisdom was proven true recently with a study by psychologist Ruth Ann Atchley at the University of Kansas, as reported in Saturday’s WSJ. They studied the […]

A big benefit of being able to return to the gym after my foot got better was once again spending time reading while working out. One book I’ve been enjoying is Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. In a chapter where he visits Siberia via a quick flight from Nome, Alaska, […]

In Italy it’s no longer much fun to drive a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. That’s because the police are now regularly stopping these sleek cars and forcing their drivers to show if they’ve paid income taxes. Surprise, surprise, many of these cool cat drivers have been opting to sell the […]

Our lives are made up of transitions and eras. The other day as I contemplated my new life here at my house without my housemate family of seven years, Mary and I discussed an idea of taking down a wall and opening up this 1920s house into a more modern […]

Change can be scary, and then again, sometimes it can feel like surfing down a big glorious wave. A few things that happened over the past few weeks convinced me of this. GoNOMAD publishes a line of travel ebooks called Plane Readers. We started the project last April, and now […]

James Irwin answered a question to a post on Reddit.com a few years ago. It would change his life. The question, explained in a story in Wired Magazine asked how a group of US Marines would do if they were taken back to ancient Rome and had to do battle […]

There is no substitute for visiting someone and talking to them face to face. I often think about this after a satisfying lunch meeting, or a few drinks with a friend, or a romantic rendezvous with my partner. That despite all of our interconnectedness, despite now much we get to […]

After a bruising fight during the past year against Amazon, officials from Macy’s realized they needed more warehouses to ship their on-line purchases from. Then it hit them. They’ve got 800 buildings, far more than Amazon will ever have, so why not use them? Now a new move to build […]

As the Greeks protest austerity and elect representatives who will push back against Germany and put their heads in the sand, once again, things look pretty grim for the European economy. Yet Americans still want to take vacations in Europe, how could they not? It’s still full of reasons to […]

What could be more fun to mock than the defeated former president of the Confederacy dressed up in women’s clothes? Back in 1865, this scenario played itself out when Jeffferson Davis, fleeing from arrest by the Union army, grabbed his wife’s petticoat in haste and dashed out the door. What […]

During his days building up what would eventually make him Vermont’s richest man, Robert Stiller’s employees used to have an expression to explain how things needed to be done.  CBS was how it went, ” ’cause Bob Says,” was what it stood for.  Stiller today was in the WSJ after […]

I think we’re making pretty good progress as a society. I say this today after reading a Boston Globe article declaring that the era of the trophy wife has passed, men no longer want to put the young lithe stay-at-home women on their arm and women are becoming far more […]

Pam Victor of Pelham takes comedy pretty seriously. In fact she says that her form of comedy, the unscripted theater , is what’s in vogue with improv makers around the US. She’s coming with The Ha-Ha’s to Greenfield’s Arts Block on Friday night, the first time a comedy show has […]

For the past seven years I’ve lived with a family consisting of two small children and two adults. In the morning when I get up, the sounds of the youngsters playing, fighting or screeching for their mom was what woke me up. Even though I am now ready to see […]