If you’ve never dined on funistrada, braised trake, or buttered ermal, you’re not missing out, nor are you alone. All of those are made-up food names that were part of a 1972 survey given to thousands of members of the U.S. military to determine...
During our online discussion about how being focused on one’s phone or camera can distract from fully participating in an experience, a listener brought up the term chimping. As we’ve noted before, chimping refers to fiddling with the buttons on a...
Some research suggests that photos of animals tend to capture the attention of humans more readily than photos of plants. Botanists even have a term for “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment.” They call it plant...
In a passage from How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College, offers an apt description of class letting out and students wandering about while focused on their phones. This is...
The poem “Abide” by Ellen Birkett Morris offers elegant advice about slowing down and paying attention. The poem appears in the anthology Running with Water, published by V Press LC and is read with permission of the author. This is part of a...
Matt from Portage, Wisconsin, says that as a musician, he often finds himself focused on analyzing the structure and quality of a piece of music rather than just sitting back and enjoying it with everyone else. He asks if the hosts face a similar...