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​“It’s a course about what ?” I asked incredulously. “Why would you want to learn how to be grumpier?” The subject was a sensitive one, as the atmosphere around our house has been rather wobbly this week. For a start — and I know just how petty and trivial this is — we completed what…

There are guys you absolutely know are going to be trouble the minute you spot them, and the first person I met in Naples, Italy was one of them. Rich and I had been in town just ten minutes, at the tail end of a three-month railway journey some years ago, and already I had…

Do you have a pandemic playlist? Me neither. But then, I’m the least musical person on the planet. At the other end of the spectrum, the folks giving out vaccines at San Francisco’s vast Moscone Center decided to energize the staff and patients by playing songs that have now become famous around here for reducing…

“You won’t believe what we did last night,” a friend told me Sunday. “We went out to a movie! Every other row was blocked off, and there was hardly anybody in the theater. A few rows in front of us there was a woman with a collie dog. The movie was a classic comedy, and…

“I read somewhere that your house is a reflection of your soul,” my sister Kate once told me when her sons were little. She looked around at the chaos, rolled her eyes, then laughed. “God, I hope that’s not true.” I could see what she meant; it’s natural to believe our inner lives should be…

​“So he says, ‘Try to remember these twenty words, in order, with their numbers.” Rich was describing Jim Kwik’s online course Improve Your Memory Now from the Omega Institute . “He said he could teach us to recall them so well that if he said ‘eleven’ we’d immediately respond ‘skis.’” “How’d you do?” I asked.…

​”​Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” — Peter Drucker ​Lately I’ve been having disturbing dreams about doing dangerous, forbidden things like shaking someone’s hand or entering rooms crowded with people whose identity and vaccination history are…

​“We are getting crazy travel bug,” my friend Lonnie wrote me this week. “Don’t know when but we are talking. Would love to pick your brain.” My emails and Zoom calls are humming with fresh possibilities now that the vaccines are making many Americans feel, as my pal Pete puts it, “completely bullet proof.” Or…

​“In my default mode, I’m mildly to severely aggravated more than 50 percent of my waking hours,” writes A. J. Jacobs in Thanks a Thousand . “That’s a ridiculous way to go through life. I don’t want to get to heaven (if such a thing exists) and spend my time complaining about the volume of…

​“Imagine that scientists have created a happiness machine. A machine that could make you as happy as you like with the push of a button. Would you use it? Would you push the button?” asks Dacher Keltner, director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. “I’ve asked that question of my students for years, and…