For all his greatness, Abraham Lincoln wasn’t much of a prognosticator.
Lincoln, born on this date in 1809, managed to give the worst prediction in the history of speechmaking when he said in the Gettysburg Address, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”
Today, that address ranks as one history’s best. Its [...]
Jeremy Lin has become a dream for the NBA and the New York Knicks, but he’s a nightmare for coaches.
That’s because Lin and his performance with the Knicks force all of us to wonder what we may be overlooking on our own team.
Since joining the Knicks, Lin has brought skill and energy to a squad [...]
How would you like to get better at whatever you do? It’s simple. Just take a trip in your imagination to Red Wing, Minn., where the first North American ski jumping exhibition took place 125 years ago today.
Ski jumping came to North American with immigrants from Norway, and it took hold in Minnesota [...]
Charles Dickens, author of several literary classics, was born 200 years ago today.
But it’s not his classics that should concern us, especially since Mark Twain once defined a classic as “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
Instead, Dickens influenced us not just in the books that he wrote, but [...]
No wonder the New York Giants are tough, tough enough to win two Super Bowls in the last five seasons. Their coach, Tom Coughlin, is as tough as they come.
How tough? Well, not glass-eating, phonebook-ripping tough, but tough enough to do this: Coughlin once asked a player to give him a top-to-bottom list of all [...]
No one I know thinks of Babe Ruth as an intellectual giant. Ruth, born on this date in 1895, partied his way through life, going for all the gusto he could. He lived that way both on and off the field.
“I hit big or I miss big,” he once said. “I like to live as [...]
For the second time in four years, the New York Giants have won the Super Bowl. And they couldn’t have done it without a great shortstop.
Shortstop?
Yes, back when Eli Manning was going through a rough stretch as a rookie quarterback with the Giants, he received a phone call from Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.
As recounted [...]
People like to say that there is no such thing as a stupid question. They are wrong. There are plenty of stupid questions, and for proof all you need to do is hang around the Super Bowl.
Over the years, the press corps has used the preview week to pose some questions that have gone down [...]
How do you even begin to talk about Novak Djokovic’s epic victory over Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final?
It lasted five hours, 53 minutes, nearly as long as the marriage between Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian.
Both Djokovic and Nadal gave everything they had. At one point, after losing a 31-stroke rally, Djokovic lay prone [...]
One day Hall of Fame baseball player Ted Williams watched a teammate return to the dugout after striking out.
“Tell me,” Williams said. “When you swung and missed that ball, did your bat go over the ball or under it?”
“What difference does it make,” the teammate wanted to know. “Either way, I struck out.”
It makes all [...]