On The Media Blog Published in On The Media Blog by On The Media Download this audio Want to embed this player? Use the code below. More info . Email a Friend Welcome to Infomagical (John Hersey for Note to Self ) Jan 28, 2016 Our friends at Note to Self have just launched a new project called…

Backstage with Freddie: a personal account of the delicate work that kept the world’s biggest rock star happy By Peter Hince ‘ I can’t do it! I simply can’t go on! It’s no good — the show will just have to be cancelled!’ Freddie Mercury, the singer with rock band Queen, often expressed to his…

Photo: John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images This week, the Cut brings you True Romance: five days of stories about love as it’s actually lived. I’m an advice columnist, so sometimes people ask me about how they can “keep the romance alive” in their marriages. This stumps me a little…

P hyllis Moen, a sociologist who was widowed when her two children were young, has made a career studying the challenges of working full time while raising a family. She was an early voice calling for the government to provide paid maternity leave and offer benefits for part-time workers, but…

F or 11 years, June Jo Lee, an ethnographer, has been traveling the country, talking to Americans about how they eat. She has often been in offices, observing white-collar workers. In one interview, a 20-something administrative assistant at an architecture firm in Seattle told her, ‘‘I don’t think…

From Hieronymous Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." I recently found the essay that I wrote as part of my application to divinity school six years and one spiritual lifetime ago. The power of the liturgy was the framework through which I confessed a faith that was unselfconscious in its candor…

Matthieu Ricard, the world's happiest man. Wikimedia Commons Who is the happiest man in the world? If you Google it, the name "Matthieu Ricard" pops up. Matthieu Ricard, 69, is a Tibetan Buddhist monk originally from France who has been called "the world's happiest man." That's because he…

Articles: Why I don’t want stuff 2016-02-16 About once a month, someone asks for my mailing address because they want to send me something.They liked something I wrote, and want to send me a gift in return.I’m very thankful, but have to say no.Here’s why. I live in a little pre-furnished apartment…

Download and stream Julien Baker on Audiotree Live -- http://smarturl.it/AT-Julien-Baker YouTube playlist: http://bit.ly/1VHpcX4 Visit the band's website: http://bit.ly/1mdIaZe -- Subscribe to Audiotreetv: http://bit.ly/1LLy4ur Watch more sessions, music videos, and live performances at:…

HÜMMEL, Germany — IN the deep stillness of a forest in winter, the sound of footsteps on a carpet of leaves died away. Peter Wohlleben had found what he was looking for: a pair of towering beeches. “These trees are friends,” he said, craning his neck to look at the leafless crowns, black against a…

Image courtesy of smaakit.co.za Some countries let you sleep. Others wake you up. For the traveler, there are three kinds of countries. There are the clockwork countries like England and Germany, where everything is so organized that nothing can go seriously wrong; where you can go as a tourist and…

Owning an island is the quintessential “I’ve arrived” declaration, but many among the well-heeled are arriving through an alternate route: They’re renting. Farhad Vladi, president of Vladi Private Islands, a brokerage firm, has rented Frégate Island in Seychelles to Bill Gates, the co-founder of…

I am woken by a loud commotion. It's 1996, and I'm ten years old, two years older than my brother, Randy. He is banging on the wall our rooms share— BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! —and screaming, "I'M SO STUPID! I WANT TO DIE!" Our mother, Feryn, runs into his room and I follow close behind. Amber hair matted…

A friend of mine convinced me to start contributing to this site. In short order, I’ve discovered that I’m old, as you can see by the picture to the left of this sentence. I have my own teeth and hair, I don’t use a cane, I go to the gym regularly for 30–40 minutes of aerobics and 15 or 20 minutes…

Durham, N.C. — ON a Thursday morning a few months ago, I got a call from my doctor’s assistant telling me that I have Stage 4 cancer. The stomach cramps I was suffering from were not caused by a faulty gallbladder, but by a massive tumor. I am 35. I did the things you might expect of someone whose…

Do you have a big creative project in store? Do you lie awake sometimes, thinking about what might go into it, what the characters or environment might look like, how it will touch the audience in a whole new way? Do you imagine what it will feel like to have this project under your belt, and what…

The lead singer reveals the mad musical science powering the band’s unforgettable videos and fresh new album Even if people don’t know the band’s name, somewhere north of 75 million of those people know “the guys from the treadmill video.” And that’s a creative cross Damian Kulash and his OK Go…

If you do the math, becoming an entrepreneur is insane. The odds of success are tiny; failure is almost guaranteed. To make the leap, you have to be fearless. Or so I thought. I spent the past three years working on a book, Originals , about the people who champion new ideas to drive creativity and…

(Photo: Bev Sykes/Flickr) Why Keeping a Daily Journal Could Change Your Life “The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” ― J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan…

Documentary E.J. McLeavey-Fisher 6 minutes The Dogist Filled with images of (what else!) beautiful dogs, this short documentary about Instagram canine photographer Elias Weiss Friedman aka The Dogist (1.8M followers!) also goes deep on the nature of creation in the digital age.

Look Catalog Even if you’ve never heard of ‘deep work’ before, you’re immediately familiar with the concept. It’s that place of intense concentration and cognitive focus where real progress is made—on whatever it is that we happen to do , be it writing or thinking or designing or creating. Producing…

I’m 29 years old, and I’ve been on Snapchat for about a year now. I post fairly often (usually on my Story), and I get a decent amount of engagement from my friends. Quite honestly, up until Thanksgiving, I thought I was pretty good at Snapchat. Then I watched my little sister on Snapchat. This is…

THEY learn to read at age 2, play Bach at 4, breeze through calculus at 6, and speak foreign languages fluently by 8. Their classmates shudder with envy; their parents rejoice at winning the lottery. But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, their careers tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.…

I was recently quoted as saying , “I don’t give a shit” if Instagram has more users than Twitter. If you read the article you’ll note there’s a big “if” before my not giving of said shit. As quoted: If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant.…

There’s a fun game I like to play in a group of trusted friends called “Controversial Opinion.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way. Opinions can…

DO some people have a special talent for serendipity? And if so, why? In 2008, an inventor named Steve Hollinger lobbed a digital camera across his studio toward a pile of pillows. “I wasn’t trying to make an invention,” he said. “I was just playing.” As his camera flew, it recorded what most of us…

Author Ann Morgan invites book lovers to follow her on a literary journey through 196 countries. “I’d always thought that I was well-traveled,” says writer Ann Morgan (TED Talk: My year reading a book from every country in the world ), but “actually, when I looked at my bookshelves, they told a very…

Among the annals of national anthems as a prelude to sporting events, few have topped the one delivered by Whitney Houston before Super Bowl XXV in 1991 in Tampa. A woman, her incredible voice and the bare minimum of extraneous notes. Her rendition came at a particularly patriotic time, just after…

Y ou have to understand. You have to remember. This is 1991. Before six people died in the World Trade Center bombing. Before 168 died in Oklahoma City. This is before 111 individuals were injured by a bomb made of nails and screws at the Atlanta Olympics. Before backpacks stuffed with pressure…

“A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.” — Will Rogers People ask me all the time for hacks, tips, tricks, shortcuts, etc. when it comes to creating companies/teams/products — in other words how to accelerate success. Every time I get the…

I've got a piece in Times Weekend today accompanied by photos that show the perils of watching too much ANTM. A post shared by K A T B R O W N 🐴🎉 (@katbrownwrites) on Jan 24, 2015 at 12:58am PST This piece was originally published in The Times in January last year . I hope they won’t mind me…

Rebecca Taylor of Slow Club performs on stage at Brudenell Social Club in Leeds.Photograph: Andrew Benge/Redferns via Getty Images M aking a living as a musician is hard. Justin Bieber might sleep on a mattress stuffed with dollar bills in a house made of Rolex watches and Ferrari parts, but down at…

T hree years ago, sitting on the beach over empty champagne glasses and the smoldering remains of late-night firecrackers, I made a New Year’s resolution to start this blog and publish once a week . Write , I told myself, attempting to channel Nike: Just. Do. It. Write about the lessons now so…

Write About What You’ve Learned Lately Chances are, you’re never not learning. Why not write about it? When you write about what you’ve learned lately, three things happen: You give others a chance to benefit from your detours and discoveries You mark your own progress, building satisfaction and…

NORMALLY, I would have finished this column weeks ago. But I kept putting it off because my New Year’s resolution is to procrastinate more. I guess I owe you an explanation. Sooner or later. We think of procrastination as a curse. Over 80 percent of college students are plagued by procrastination,…

from the book “Hell Yeah or No”: Switch strategies 2016-01-27 Driving directions include a few turns:Go straight until that intersection.Turn left until it ends.Turn right, up the hill, and through the last gate. The same is true in life.You need to change directions a few times to get where you…

(Photo: Pixabay) I once worked for an incredibly dysfunctional company filled with people who had no business doing the jobs they had been hired to do. The head of this company, forced to deal with the endless and frustrating mistakes made by his incompetent employees, did not respond with…

Now with computers on our laps, it’s hard to be perfectly, indulgently sick in bed. With our phones right there, we are tied to the life we were living yesterday, when we weren’t yet sick in bed. It’s time to be truly sick in bed this winter — sick like in the old days, when there was ginger ale…

Comedy Giancarlo Fiorentini & Jonathan Grimm 7 minutes 36 Questions Two strangers participate in an experiment designed to make them fall in love by asking each another 36 increasingly personal questions.