To understand football, or sport, and its relationship to life, read Jonathan Liew. If you can only read one sports writer, read Liew. When he is absent from these pages, even for the few days as it must be, there is a hole. No offense intended, but the gap with everyone else is galactic. And I love that it is by this particular Englishman. Turning to the article, I would bet, anything, that as the game ended and Harry Kane and Son Heung-min looked across at their bitter rivals, not-too-deep down inside they would want to play on this flowing, … Continue reading Read Jon Liew

The moment you realize that the guy you’re about to hit is that guy playing his first game back after his heart stopped 7-8 months ago during the European Championships — when the world stood still and together for a moment — and you hug him instead. Like you would your big brother who just gave you a nasty razzberry. Continue reading Erickson’s Razzberry

Whether Lupita Nyong’o has permanently, or like past cultural phenomena, merely briefly, expanded conceptions of beauty is still to be played out.  But her arrangement with Lancôme means that she will never have to accept Hollywood drivel as her next project, should that notorious industry do, again, what it has done in the past, with such outside the box wonders.   *                    *                    * It goes without saying that when you’re handed the part of a lifetime, you play it to the hilt. In the case of Lupita Nyong’o, the 31-year old Oscar winner — born in Mexico, raised in Kenya, … Continue reading Some Freedom for Lupita

At one time, maybe still, you could have read everywhere about “The Secret” and “Law of Attraction,” and this ubiquity, and the mystical panacea they promised, resulted in an understandable, predictable backlash. But if you get beyond this, you will see that their essential principles merely recast basic tenets of various religions, philosophers and self-help books. Akhil Sharma himself recasts these tenets quite nicely in The Trick of Life in this week’s NYT Sunday Review.  Lost in depression, inertia and the fear driving them, Sharma found the way out simply to “be outside myself” because “[m]y mind had become uninhabitable.”  … Continue reading “I Love You, I Love You”

Outgoing President of Chile is a smart guy.  He reminds us that even when right, we must still persuade.  And we might fail.  Don’t give up. He also reaffirms the need for equal education and jobs to end extreme inequality.  Things we know but are vigorously opposed by too many in this nation. Monocle:What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as president? Sebastián Piñera: You learn to be more humble, more patient. You realise that you cannot get everything done immediately. That you have to negotiate and compromise. Even if you’re right, you have to spend a lot of time convincing … Continue reading Sebastián Piñera: His Greatest Lesson and the Wealthy

In my own personal journey of trying to be a better person, I realised that it was all about aiming to be happy. Nothing more, nothing less. When you’re happy, you’re effectively better in every aspect of your life. The second realisation is that happiness comes from shedding the unnecessary in life, as in you need to stop caring about certain things. The third realisation? A lot of these unnecessary things are painfully obvious. More often than not, it’s plain common sense. Here’s 10 things happy people don’t care for. 1. AGE Indeed, age is just a number. And happy people know this … Continue reading 10 Things Happy People Don’t Care For | Alden Tan

SOME readers collectively hissed after I wrote a week ago about the need for early-childhood interventions to broaden opportunity in America. I focused on a 3-year-old boy in West Virginia named Johnny Weethee whose hearing impairment had gone undetected, leading him to suffer speech and development problems that may dog him for the rest of his life. A photo of Johnny and his mom, Truffles Weethee, accompanied the column and readers honed in on Truffles’ tattoos and weight. “You show a photograph of a fat woman with tons of tattoos all over that she paid for,” one caller said. “And … Continue reading Sunday Review | The Compassion Gap

Facilitating an “Impulse to Shortcut Actual Thought” In providing access to information and knowledge that would have required a potentially, and for many, likely, preclusive amount of time, research and reading, the Internet shortcut has had equally perverse consequences as well.  It facilitates natural tendencies towards intellectual laziness, where we co-opt and substitute others’ hard wrought conclusions for our own, without the benefits of the intellectual rigor, hypothesizing and failing, refinement and evolution from which those conclusions sprang.  While we are busy manipulating others’ validation , we are missing nuances they discovered from developing it on our own.  Eager to … Continue reading Sunday Review | Don’t Quote Me on This | MARIA KONNIKOVA

Why Creative Geniuses Often Keep a Messy Desk Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Mark Twain. What is one thing these three visionaries have in common? They all had very messy workspaces. This post originally appeared on the Busy Building Things Blog. These three game-changers were never ones to follow the crowd. We can see this by how unconventionally disorganized their desks are. There was a method to this madness: under the mass of papers, magazines, and various objects, there is a sense of organization only the creator can operate through. Here are some other creative powerhouses that have messy desks: … Continue reading Why Creative Geniuses Often Keep a Messy Desk | lifehacker

“It’s actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self,” Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. “The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self … Imaginative people have messier minds.” While there’s no “typical” creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. Here are 18 things they do differently. They daydream. Although daydreaming may seem mindless, a 2012 study suggested it could actually involve a highly … Continue reading 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently | Carolyn Gregoire

Just as we’ve turned the coverage of politics into sports, we’re doing the same with geopolitics. There is much nonsense being written about how Vladimir Putin showed how he is “tougher” than Barack Obama and how Obama now needs to demonstrate his manhood. This is how great powers get drawn into the politics of small tribes and end up in great wars that end badly for everyone. We vastly exaggerate Putin’s strength — so does he — and we vastly underestimate our own strength, and ability to weaken him through nonmilitary means. Let’s start with Putin. Any man who actually … Continue reading Putin Will Ultimately Lose — Unless We Prevent Him

PARIS — IF all goes according to plan, I’ll turn 44 soon after this column appears. So far in my adult life, I’ve never managed to grasp a decade’s main point until long after it was over. It turns out that I wasn’t supposed to spend my 20s frantically looking for a husband; I should have been building my career and enjoying my last gasp of freedom. I then spent my 30s ruminating on grievances accumulated in my 20s. This time around, I’d like to save time by figuring out the decade while I’m still in it. Entering middle age … Continue reading NYT SundayReview | What You Learn in Your 40s | Pamela Druckerman