On a punishingly hot afternoon last June, Ali Cole stepped into Philadelphia’s elegant, French Renaissance Revival Bellevue Hotel carrying Father’s Day gifts for a man she didn’t know existed two months earlier ― her biological father, who was not the man who had raised her.
Until last spring, Ali had no reason to question whether the man she grew up believing was her father really was.
And to make matters even stranger, her friend Jess McIntosh had been through something similar just six months before that, when an email from Ancestry.com landed in her inbox naming the man who had donated sperm to her mother more than three decades ago.
Neither woman had set out to find her father. Ali, 39, and Jess, 37, have been friends for more than 15 years. They were roommates as undergrads, and have seen each other through the stresses of college, starting their careers, breakups, and family deaths. Ali recently left a career in advertising to become a floral designer, and Jess is a political consultant and broadcaster. They’re both my friends, too, and I’ve watched over the last year as they confronted these exhilarating and painful new truths about their lives.
Have you ever stated your opinion only to be shot down by someone else?
Maybe by your spouse, boss, parents, or best friend? Or even a stranger?
It happened to me many times in the past. Growing up, I always had an opinion about everything.
Having an opinion doesn’t mean you know everything. It just means you have something to say. You could be wrong.
But often times, my teachers, friends, girlfriends, co-workers, and even friends would immediately say things like, “That’s not true!” So gradually, I gave up speaking my mind. I became afraid.
We all want to lead happy, successful lives. But for parents, there’s a time when your priorities shift a bit, and your most important goals start to involve setting your kids up for success and happiness in their own lives.
Parental priorities aren’t the only factor, of course. There are plenty of stories out there about people who defied the odds and achieved great success despite their parents’ involvement, not because of it.
Still, scientists and researchers have made a lot of progress studying what the parents of the larger share of successful people have in common. Here are 10 of the most important things those parents do, which I found while compiling my free e-book, How to Raise Successful Kids.
At 4 a.m. on June 21, South Philadelphia residents were awoken by the sound of a large explosion: The Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery was on fire for the second time in two weeks. Neighbors watched as the flames turned into a giant mushroom cloud and as the mushroom cloud turned into a thick blanket of black smoke. The explosion was so big it was recorded by a satellite in space.
“I could hear it from my house,” said one resident, PennEnvironment Executive Director David Masur. “We were two blocks out of the shelter-in-place radius.”
The explosion occurred close to where a large volume of hydrofluoric acid was stored ― and if that had caught fire, it could have done devastating damage to the community, Masur explained.
“If that had exploded, you would have had a huge hydrofluoric acid cloud, which has all sorts of negative health effects depending on exposure. We would have had to evacuate a 7- to 10-mile radius, that’s 1.1 million people. It would have been catastrophic.”
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Matt Rourke/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A South Philly resident watches as the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery goes up in flames on June 21.
It’s possible that success is at least partly about whom you know. But success is definitely about what you know, and what you actually do with the knowledge you gain.
So what can you do if you need remember something important?
Adam Grant took a deep dive into memory research to found a simple answer. (Adam is an organizational psychologist, best-selling author, host of the superb podcast WorkLife, co-founder of Givitas, and nice enough to provide a blurb for my book.)
The heat wave gripping large swaths of the Midwest and Northeast has killed at least three people, forced the evacuation of about 250 residents from a retirement home, and sparked the cancellation of major public events.
Other severe weather in the upper Midwest meanwhile left more than 200,000 households and businesses in Michigan without power Saturday morning. High winds and storms in the state on Friday knocked out power lines, with utility crews working to repair the outages as quickly as possible.
In Maryland, health officials said a Prince George’s County man and a Worcester County woman died this week from extreme heat. Earlier this month, a Baltimore City man and an Anne Arundel County woman died.
Kudos to the fans. One of the nominees for the Hugo Awards this year is Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction archive containing nearly 5 million fanworks—about the size of the English Wikipedia, and several years younger. It’s not just the fanfic, fanart, fanvids, and other fanworks, impressive as they are, that make Archive of Our Own worthy of one of the biggest honors in science fiction and fantasy. It’s also the architecture of the site itself.
At a time when we’re trying to figure out how to make the internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest of tech could learn from.
Here’s a problem that AO3 users, like the rest of the internet, encounter every day: How do you find a particular thing you’re interested in, while filtering out all the other stuff you don’t care about? Most websites end up with tags of some sort. I might look through a medical journal database for articles tagged “cataracts,” search a stock photo site for pictures tagged “businesspeople,” or click on a social media hashtag to see what people are saying about the latest episode of #GameOfThrones.
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Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction database recently nominated for a Hugo, has perfected a system of tagging that the rest of the web could emulate.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Family Secret
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Don’t Be Apologetic
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Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction database recently nominated for a Hugo, has perfected a system of tagging that the rest of the web could emulate.
James' World 2 