Productivity falls off sharplybut breakthroughs are stillpossible; just keep trying Many of this year’s cohort of Nobel laureates achieved their award-winning efforts when they were quite young — a phenomenon detected by decades of research on creativity. J. Michael Kosterlitz, co-recipient of the Nobel in physics, was 31 at the time of his prizewinning discovery, […]

Generally speaking, Christmas trees arrive in one of two ways: 1. You pack a saw and rope and drive to a Cut Your Own Tree Farm, which makes you feel like a beefy, whiskey-swilling, red-bearded lumberjack army — crawling through dirt and pine needles and probably fire ants until you ask a 19-year-old to help […]

Produced by Maine Poetry Central and Dennis Camire This week’s poem by Bruce Guernsey beautifully describes an icehouse of old, and the wonderful ending turns the poem into a quiet, cool ode that soothes.   The Icehouse By Bruce Guernsey   Where the puckerbrush snags your lure along the west side of the lake is […]

Candy and sugar have once again invaded our world. It began innocently enough with a gingerbread house, then lingered with the red-and-green sprinkle cookies from friends, then endured with the classroom holiday parties, the candy canes that garnish every wrapped present, and the hot chocolate with marshmallows that lures my kids on these cold days.I […]

Teen drug and alcohol use has fallen to levels not seen since the height of the drug war in the 1990s, according to new federal survey data. The Monitoring the Future survey of about 50,000 high school students found that “considerably fewer teens reported using any illicit drug other than marijuana in the prior 12 […]