Nelson Mandela on exercise on Robben Island
When he was in prison on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela spent long periods engaged in hard manual labor— breaking rocks into gravel, and working in a quarry. You
Alain Connes: “when fighting with a very complicated problem… go for a long walk”
Advice from Alain Connes (from the Princeton Companion to Mathematics) on being creative: Walks. One very sane exercise, when fighting with a very complicated problem (often involving computations),
Magnus Carlsen and the physical demands of chess
You might not think of chess players as athletes, as Christopher Berglund wrote in Psychology Today in 2013, while chess of course is a deeply cerebral sport, it's
Wilder Penfield on the uses of idleness
Wilder Penfield, from his 1962 address "The Use of Idleness," republished in The Second Career: The best rest for doing one thing is doing another until you fall
William James on the “fireside tabby-cats of Norway”
From William James' The Gospel of Relaxation, a great bit about the impact of exercise on one's capacity to contribute to public life: Consider, for example, the effects
Athletes, academic performance, and the stereotype threat
A couple months ago Annie Murphy Paul wrote about new research demonstrating that the “stereotype threat”— the negative effect that stereotypes about low academic performance can have on
Brain fatigue and walks in Edinburgh
One of my favorite places in the world is Edinburgh. I first went there in graduate school, and spend several days at the Royal Observatory, and several nights
Egocasting, personal media, and cohesion in professional sports
Christine Rosen has a great term, "egocasting," to describe the enclosed, self-preferring world of RSS feeds, music, and news that we cue up for ourselves. One of the