Tag Archives: personal
I’ve just started reading Michael Oher’s new book,
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I walked into the spelling bee just as my daughter was at the microphone for her first word of the day. She saw me coming in, and for a moment I panicked, thinking that I would distract her and she’d miss an easy one.
Fortunately, the word was “exclusive,” and I suspect Meredith could spell the word before she could pronounce it. As a seventh grader, it was no challenge whatsoever.
That’s the way it is in our family. Kimberly and I are journalists, and we’re all avid readers. Spelling comes as naturally to us as breathing. I wasn’t surprised to learn that spelling and reading proficiency have a very strong genetic component:
According to John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University Medical School, both reading and spelling require a phenomenal amount of brain power. Deciphering…
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“The way we normally handle this,” the ski-patrol guy explained to me on the phone Thursday night, “is we put your daughter on a backboard, call an ambulance, and send her to the emergency room.”
“Or,” I suggested, “you could give her an ibuprofen for her headache, and maybe suggest she work on her skiing technique.”
We compromised: no ibuprofen, and no emergency room.
Meredith was fine, of course, despite taking a hard fall in her second outing of the season with her middle school’s ski club. It was only her fourth time on skis in her young life, but she’d insisted she didn’t need lessons, and in fact had expressed nothing but overconfidence in her skills leading up to her tumble.
If I were a great parent like Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I’d…
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I mentioned in the previous post that, to my shame, I read very few new books this year. And I feel guilty about that, like I’m a traitor to my profession.
I’m not the only one feeling guilt. Check out this confession by David Streitfeld from last weekend’s New York Times, in which he admits to buying used books from resellers rather than purchasing them new:
Here’s one example of how I casually wreak destruction. I was reading “Sylvia,” an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife. Looking for material about Mr. Michaels, I saw his friend Wendy Lesser had written a long essay about him in a book published last year by Pantheon. I could buy a new paperback edition of that book, “Room for Doubt,” for $13.95 plus tax in a…
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For me, this holiday season was more exhausting and stressful than usual, for reasons that are ultimately positive.
I was busy with work, which is great. I love my new(ish) job at Testosterone Muscle, a magazine I admired for 10 years before I finally joined the team this summer.
Kimberly and I were driven like parental sled dogs this December, but I can’t complain about that either. I love the fact our children do things that weren’t available to us when we were growing up. When I was a kid, I got a few karate lessons and could only play sports if my parents didn’t have to drive me back and forth. Kimberly got to do even less. Yeah, it’s a pain to shuttle Harrison to karate twice a week, and Annie to ballet, and Meredith to all the things she’s involved in,…
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I’ve spent big parts of my life alternately making bad decisions, and then recovering from the damage caused by those bad decisions, which is why I enjoyed reading this brief interview in today’s New York Times Magazine.
The upshot: Our brains make decisions in the prefrontal cortex, which is bigger in humans than in other animals. It’s also the last part of the brain to develop, which is why we don’t want children making important decisions, for themselves or for others.
If you read my post last week about the Christmas-tree fiasco, you know how it worked out the last time I ignored my adult brain and listened to someone with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. That decision was actually worse than I described, thanks to a few minor and entirely self-inflicted calamities.
In the comments, I left the subject on an upbeat note: We’d gotten…
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When we lived in Los Angeles, my wife and I put up an artificial tree each year. But each year, like a bad houseguest, the tree gathered more dust, shed more needles, and sucked more joy out of the air. That’s why, when we moved here to Pennsylvania, we left the disassembled fake tree in the basement and went with a real live Christmas tree each December. (And, of course, by “live” I mean a tree we killed.)
Until this year. We woke up Saturday morning, went through the usual panic of getting kids to karate and Girl Scouts and who knows what else — I really only pay attention if I have to drive the kid there myself — and realized, halfway through the day, that we needed to get a Christmas tree. Now. Every other weekend day is booked solid for the rest of…
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One of my favorite events each year is the annual JP Fitness Summit.
Information about the 2009 Summit has just been posted, and it looks like a great lineup of speakers: Alan Aragon, who was a big hit at last year’s event; Leigh Peele, an Internet friend I’ve looked forward to meeting; Jamie Hale, an up-and-coming strength coach; and some bald-headed guy, who’s usually good for a few laughs.
This year’s Summit is May 15-17. The big news is that it’s moving to Kansas City after six years in Little Rock. I’ve been to five of the events in Little Rock, and always enjoyed myself, but I confess I’m looking forward to the change. I have family in K.C., so this trip is a combo platter for me — fun with my Internet friends, and fun with my mom,…
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Lou Schuler is an award-winning fitness journalist and author of many popular books about strength training and nutrition. For the full story, click here.
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