David Given Schwarm

In the sport of ultramarathioning, racers sometimes run a hundred miles or more at a stretch. The sport’s king is Dean Karnazes, an unlikely athlete who hadn’t done any running until he dead-end life left him feeling so frustrated that he just stripped down to his underwear and ran out into the night. He hasn’t…

I you’ve ever been in a book group before, you know what wildly different interpretations readers can derive from the same passage. A screamingly obvious Freudian allegory to one reader will be a hilarious skewering of today’s political parties to another. The discussions are especially fiery when an author leaves a little ambiguity in the…

As part of their ethincal code, archaeologists agree to leave a protion of their excavation sites untouched. They do this as a gift to the archaeologists of the future, who may be able to glean more from the area than current technologies allow. As you dig deeper into your novel, you may find that your…

Procrastination, I think, gets a bad rap. To start a project and see it through to completion, we need the pressure and sense of urgency procrastination provides. Sure, in the midst of a frantic all-nighter to get a paper or report done, it feels horribly dysfunctional. But I see procrastination as a terrifically functional way…

An anthropologist named Victor Turnere added a new wrinkle to the disciplines canon in the 1950’s when he wrote about the importance of something called limen. Translating roughly as “threshold,” limen refers to those times like adolescence when we’re caught between two life phases. In these neither-here-nor-there periods, he wrote, levels of energy and disorder…

One of the most useful office products in the world, the Post-It(r) Note, began as a total failure. A scientist at 3M was trying to brew up a batch of super-strong adhesive. One particularly miserable attempt produced a substance that could barely hold two pieces of paper together. It took four years for the company…

A few years ago, my car’s rearview mirror dropped off the windshield and landed in my lap. Freaked out, I headed over to an autoparts store where they assured me it happens all the time, and sold me a kit to glue it back in place. But after I got used to the mirror’s absence,…