I love to read both fiction and non-fiction (and do so in about equal amounts). While I think fiction is hugely important and beneficial, non-fiction books have had a bigger impact on how I view the world. (For the IFOD on the special benefits of reading fiction,...

What's your life's purpose? It's a big question, and finding an answer is hard. It's common to think of purpose with a capital "P" -- an overarching reason for being. The Japanese have a different approach -- they look for "purposes" with a little p rather than a...

Here's my now 13 year old dog Dylan as a puppy. Back in the middle ages, there were all sorts of crazy and ineffectual medical treatments: blood-letting to cure sickness, drilling holes in the skull to treat head pain and other brain maladies, and the use of astrology...

Source By the time you're an adult, you've acquired a ton of knowledge, from interesting facts about the thickness of hockey rink ice to knowing how to safely drive in the snow. How have you learned all that you have? Some things you learned formally through explicit...

That's a lot of colors to choose from! [This IFOD is guest-written by my friend Jill Gaither, brilliant polymath and autodidact. She lives in St. Louis and is the Regional Business Manager for Aadi Bioscience. She has a love for reading and a degree in journalism. You...

The main way I've always used Google is to go to the homepage and just type in what I want to search for. For example, if I want to read reviews of Joy Division's 1979 album "Unknown Pleasures," I'd just do this: That search gave me 5.6 million results. The top...

Charles Daniels I just finished a book written by a friend of mine: The Watermen: The Birth of American Swimming and One Young Man's Fight to Capture Olympic Gold. It is along the lines of Boys in the Boat and Unbroken -- a story of perserverance and grit. America is...

On January 2, 2019, the St. Louis Blues had the worst record in the NHL. Five days later rookie goalie Jordan Binnington made his first start and went on to lead the Blues to their first Stanley Cup. He's a quirky guy (as most NHL goalies are). In the midst of the...

Yesterday I was on the phone with my wife and I accidentally hung up on her. She was on her way home from running an errand so I didn't call her back thinking she'd be home soon. A few minutes later she called me and said, "you didn't call me back -- I was worried you...

About a decade ago my firm bought a CRM software system (CRM = "customer relationship management"). After we implemented it, we noticed that almost nobody was using it to record client interactions or to keep track of to-dos. Given that was the main reason we bought...

Smoke rises from a crack in the road in Centralia Pennsylvania in 2010. Centralia, Pennsylvania was a mining town home to over 1,500 residents. The town had a problem: illegal trash dumps that created odors and rat infestations. To solve the problem, in 1962 the city...

My eldest daughter, Claire, turns 23 today. On one hand, it totally feels like 23 years have passed. Yet, her birth also seems like it just happened. The vagaries of time are interesting. Claire hates to flip the page to a new age. When she turned four she cried...