If an athlete takes a shortcut - literally, for example, by running a street that shortens the marathon route by a quarter mile - he or she doesn't have an insurmountable advantage. But it's an unfair advantage, and in a field of equally matched athl...
Train at the same pace day after day, week after week, year after year, and that's the kind of running the body adapts to. But break out of that comfort zone with a little speedwork now and then, and the body will learn to deal with the new demands.
Beginning runners come in all shapes, sizes and pre-existing conditions, so there's no magic formula for determining exactly how much basic running is needed before you start speedwork. Most experts, though, recommend three or four months of preparat...
The body responds to a calorie deficit by slowing down the metabolism and burning muscle tissue. That leads to weakness, sluggishness, slow times. In girls, it can also result in cessation of menstrual periods, which in turn leads to loss of bone den...
What we now call "morality" was evolved – as nearly all social and physical human attributes were – to aid us in survival and, ultimately, reproduction. This morality requires only that we be guided by our developed conscience (or "moral sense") ...
When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.
We must rid this nation of the United Nations, which provides the communist conspiracy with a headquarters here on our own shores, and which actually makes it impossible for the United States to form its own decisions about its conduct and policies i...
Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externaliz...
How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process de...
Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group o...
Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.
Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
I like people who don't accept boundaries. Like Florence Nightingale. And Napoleon or Louis XIV, though I'm not sure how much I'd have liked to meet them. I admire people who aren't circumscribed by circumstance.
Mo Udall didn't want the presidency bad enough. He was too sane. He was a marvelous guy, but you had the feeling there was another Udall outside his body watching the candidate Udall who was too extravagant, telling him to cut it out.
The country is stronger than the result of any one election. But we shouldn't forget that these are just ordinary people. I wish Americans would look at them level, not down or up - just level. It doesn't take some special dimension to be president.
Sarajevo was this beautiful city, very cosmopolitan, multiethnic, full of wonderful people, artists and writers and poets and Serbs and Muslims and Croats, and living side by side. And then this medieval siege, and it was a medieval siege, came, and ...
Is it in our national interest to overheat the planet? That's the question Obama faces in deciding whether to approve Keystone XL, a 2,000-mile-long pipeline that will bring 500,000 barrels of tar-sand oil from Canada to oil refineries on the Gulf of...
The oil industry fought hard to keep Keystone alive, making wildly exaggerated claims that the pipeline - the country's largest infrastructure project - would create tens of thousands of jobs and decrease America's reliance on oil from the Middle Eas...
You think the weather is weird now? Just wait. A new MIT study, just published in a peer-reviewed journal, projects that the Earth could see warming of more than 9 degrees F by 2100 - more than twice earlier projections.
It's not all Obama's fault: His plans to rebuild America's energy infrastructure have been hampered by the recession, and his efforts on global warming have been stymied by Tea Party wackos and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.
Hey, the ubiquitous Leak-Cam is to 2010 as the bottom-of-the-screen news ticker was to late 2001: What you're seeing beneath the news anchor or talking head may not actually include any new information, but you feel like you're watching something dra...
