Category: Business

Georgia appraised Ossabaw Island at $16 million in 1978 and Sandy West sold it to the state for half that, keeping a life estate on 23 acres around the family house; she lived there until she was 103, died on her 108th birthday, and the 26,000-acre island still has no bridge and no airfield

August 30, 2026

Ossabaw Island sits twenty minutes by boat from Savannah, Georgia, and several decades from everywhere else. It is the state’s third-largest barrier island, 26,000 acres of beach, salt marsh and live-oak forest hung

In 1927 John D. Rockefeller Jr. began buying up Jackson Hole ranchland through a Utah shell company called the Snake River Land Company, and after 15 years of Congress refusing the gift he wrote to the Interior Secretary saying he would sell the lot on the open market to any satisfactory buyer

August 30, 2026

The valley floor of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is one of the most photographed landscapes in America: sagebrush flats running to the Snake River, the Teton range erupting behind them with no foothills to

The habits that supposedly keep you from getting rich, and what the evidence says really does

August 30, 2026

Cultural habits that prevent you from becoming rich is a headline that sells because it flatters a comforting idea: that wealth is mostly a matter of personal discipline, and that anyone not rich

How to be a better man, according to the evidence rather than the two loudest camps

August 30, 2026

How to be a better man is one of those searches that returns two opposite answers, both of them loud. One camp hands over a traditional script: provide, stay stoic, toughen up, need

Virginia declined to buy Mount Vernon and Congress argued it was not the federal government’s business, so in 1858 a South Carolina woman raised $200,000 in dollar subscriptions and bought George Washington’s house herself; the association she founded has never taken public money since

August 29, 2026

By the early 1850s, the most famous house in America was falling down. Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate on the Potomac, had passed through three generations of Washington heirs, each less able than

The colonists who settled the Giant Forest in 1886 renamed the largest tree on earth the Karl Marx Tree because they objected to what Sherman had done in the Indian wars, and when the government took their claims four years later it went back to being called General Sherman

August 29, 2026

Two million people a year walk the paved path in Sequoia National Park to stand before the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on Earth by volume, 275 feet of sequoia that was

A UCL study found that reaching near-automaticity in a new daily behaviour took anywhere from 18 to 254 days, with a median of 66 — demolishing the popular idea that every habit forms in just 21 days.

August 29, 2026

The promise of a 21-day habit has always been appealing. It offers a clean date on the calendar: repeat a behaviour for three weeks and effort is supposed to give way to autopilot.

Work-life balance matters, but not as a perfect ratio, and not as a problem you can solve alone

August 28, 2026

Keep a balance between work and home. It is advice so universally endorsed that it barely registers as advice at all, more a sort of ambient wisdom that everyone nods at and few

Productivity advice is built around doing more in less time, and the line most often quoted against it, that the dying wish they had worked less, comes not from decades of research but from one palliative carer’s account of the patients she personally nursed

August 28, 2026

There is a line that shows up at the end of almost every argument against overwork. Nobody, it goes, ever lay dying wishing they had spent more time at the office. It arrives

A KPMG survey of 1,019 professionals found that 57 percent would choose a job paying 10 percent below market with close workplace friendships over one paying 10 percent above market without them—placing human connection above a 20-point difference in pay.

August 28, 2026

A job paying 10 percent above market appears, on paper, to have an obvious advantage over one paying 10 percent below. KPMG asked what happened when the lower-paying role came with close workplace