How Staying Mentally Fit Can Make a Difference

Your brain isn’t a muscle, but you can treat it like one

Many people focus on physical fitness, but few know that brain fitness is also something you can work on. In fact, you can exercise your brain as often as you would your arms or abs--and the results can be positive and empowering.

The Best Life Stories

 Homeward Bound

By Jim Ruland, San Diego, CA 

When I was in the Navy, I drank like a sailor. When I got out of the Navy, I drank like a sailor. You could say I went overboard. Swam with sharks and chased mermaids. Spent all my clams in the octopus's garden. The deeps and the darks suited me fine. Closing time came; I looked around. I was all alone in Davy Jones's lockup. Looked for a way out, but there was no ship in the bottle. Just more bottles, and every one an ocean. Took a long time before I settled on the bottom. But look! A boat on the horizon. A life raft with my wife and daughter in it. "You're here," they cheered. "Take us ashore!" "I'm just a drunken sailor," I said. My wife reeled me in. "No, you're the captain." I looked to the stars and plotted our course for home.

THE JUDGES SAID: Jim Ruland's story sails along on clever metaphors, but on a deeper level, it's a moving look at one man's desolation and the renewal he found in his family's faith and love. It's a tale you'll want to read twice — and share.

Watch video of Jim Ruland reading his story. 

Read more: http://www.rd.com/slideshows/the-best-life-stories/#ixzz2gqzcWePC

Living to impress others

Will Smith once said, “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t  need to impress people they don’t like”. Whatever happened to ‘living within your means’ and ‘prioritising’ what really matters? People today are so caught up in “keeping up” or “proving a point” and “showing off”. It’s actually laughable, because they get stressed earning the money and then stressed spending it. None of it becomes actually meaningful or leads to inner contentment. Women buy designer bags running into lakhs from the latest season’s collection, not because they needs another handbag but because it makes them feel ‘worthy’ when they’re with friends. It’s as if they become less valuable or less important if they were to walk in with something bought off the road. Their worth and value is equated to their material possessions. Men want fancy cars that put enormous financial pressure on their bank balances, and monthly EMI’s become impossible to handle, only so that people who see them for those two minutes arriving and departing from a venue think highly of them. I know many men who say “people will not take me seriously if I drive a ‘lesser’ car”. This disease to impress also involves getting a “trophy” wife, so others will envy you. It doesn’t matter if she’s not the perfect person for you or the perfect homemaker, what matters is other’s perceptions of her and your glee at others’ envy. It’s all so absurd. People compromise on their children’s activities, quality education, and needs because they are so busy impressing “others” with what the same money can “buy” for their own “impression”. Such people that think they ‘have a life’ need to in reality ‘get a life’! They live in shackles and a perception prison, whereas the actual joy of life is in the revelling of simply being ‘you’!

War and Baked Beans

DELAWARE, Ohio —

A few Saturdays ago, I woke from a nap craving my mother’s baked beans. Maybe it’s because I will be a grandfather in a few months. I know how migratory the mind can be. Or maybe it’s because we were about to bomb Syria.

I am surprised how easily Mr. Putin outfoxed Mr. Obama. The exceptional American made to look foolish by the evil Russian. I try to imagine the moment of embarrassment when Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry looked at each other, the blood rushing in their necks, their cheeks burning like hot brass, their bellies aching, because that’s how men (and boys) feel when they are embarrassed.

Your First Illicit Reading Experience

Later this week, The New York Times Book Review will publish its Sex Issue, containing reviews of the latest fiction and nonfiction books that deal with human sexuality. A select group of writers, including Nicholson Baker, Alison Bechdel, Rachel Kushner, Geoff Dyer and Jackie Collins, will share their memories of the first illicit thing they ever read. They describe the mixture of fear, shame, elation and pure raw nerves they felt reading something without the endorsement of parents or teachers.

The Tumultuous Life and Nuanced Work of Israel’s Greatest Children’s Book Writer

After tragedy, Dvora Omer found flaws, beauty in the nation’s founding figures, turning them into literary heroes

There are many different ways to be dumb about literature. When you’re in high school, the men and women who teach it to you—sometimes passionate and sweet, too often underpaid, insecure, and sour—insist that your primary task as a reader is to decipher the hidden meanings that the author weaved throughout the text like a serial killer leaving behind clues to taunt his weary pursuers

Indian media: Digital tour of India's monuments

The Taj Mahal is one of India's most iconic monuments

Media are reporting that Google and the Indian government have joined hands to create a virtual tour of the country's top 100 heritage sites.

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the tech giant's project will create "360 degree imagery" of popular monuments like the Taj Mahal and the Khajuraho temples.

5 Herbs and Veggies that Love Growing Indoors

Photo by Flickr user jorge zapico

Among its many proven health benefits, gardening fights stress and gets your blood pumping. But what if you live in a small, indoor space? Not to worry! We're here to make sure that anyone can reap the benefits – and the fruits – of gardening, with the right plant choices and placement. Enjoy!

Michael Jackson: 15 things you didn't know

n the lexicon of pop culture, Michael Jackson is legend. In an extraordinary career that began when he was five, Michael Jackson notched up milestones including recording the most successful album of all time (Thriller) and winning eight Grammys in a single year, a record. To celebrate his 55th birth anniversary, here are 15 things about MJ only a true fan would know. 

1.Michael Jackson described his own voice as a pre-teen singing with The Jackson 5 as sounding "like Minnie Mouse."

Michael Jackson wanted to achieve movie stardom, reveals secret diary

Michael Jackson also wanted to launch a line of soda and cookies

Michael Jackson wanted to achieve movie stardom in a bid to immortalise his fame, according to a secret diary that he kept before his death.

Caring for a Mind in Crisis

Angelika Schwarz/Getty Images

One afternoon at a school not far from the hospital where I was working, a teacher opened a utility closet and found a staff member passed out on the floor. He was clutching a small bloody mass in one hand, a sharp knife in the other, she reported, a red stain spreading rapidly at his middle.

He had amputated his genitals.

The curious world of Walter Potter – in pictures

Walter Potter (1835-1918) was an amateur taxidermist who built tableaux that became icons of Victorian whimsy.A new book by historian of taxidermy Dr Pat Morris and New York-based artist and curator Joanna Ebenstein seeks to preserve and celebrate the now-dispersed collection with new photographs of his best-loved works

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The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list

From Don Quixote to American Pastoral, take a look at the 100 greatest novels of all time

The greatest novel of all time? ... windmills in La Mancha feature in Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote. Photograph: Victor Fraile / Reuters

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes

The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries. 

Buy Don Quixote at the Guardian Bookshop

2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan

The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair. 

Buy Pilgrim's Progress at the Guardian Bookshop

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 

The first English novel. 

Buy Robinson Crusoe at the Guardian Bookshop

4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 

A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision. 

Buy Gulliver's Travels at the Guardian Bookshop

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Jonathan Franzen: what's wrong with the modern world

While we are busy tweeting, texting and spending, the world is drifting towards disaster, believes Jonathan Franzen, whose despair at our insatiable technoconsumerism echoes the apocalyptic essays of the satirist Karl Kraus – 'the Great Hater'

Jonathan Franzen confesses to 'feeling some version of [Karl Kraus's] disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better succumbs to Twitter'. Illustration: Mark Lazenby

Karl Kraus was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin-de-siecle Vienna's famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death in 1936, he edited and published the influential magazine Die Fackel(The Torch); from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine's sole author. Although Kraus would probably have hated blogs, Die Fackel was like a blog that everybody who mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. Kraus was especially well known for his aphorisms – for example, "Psychoanalysis is that disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure" – and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings.

The thing about Kraus is that he's is very hard to follow on a first reading – deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the playwright Hermann Bahr, before attacking him: "If he understands one sentence of the essay, I'll retract the entire thing." If you read Kraus's sentences more than once, you'll find that they have a lot to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment.

Here, for example, is the first paragraph of his essay "Heine and the Consequences".

"Two strains of intellectual vulgarity: defenselessness against content and defenselessness against form. The one experiences only the material side of art. It is of German origin. The other experiences even the rawest of materials artistically. It is of Romance origin. [Romance meaning Romance-language — French or Italian.] To the one, art is an instrument; to the other, life is an ornament. In which hell would the artist prefer to fry? He'd surely still rather live among the Germans. For although they've strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they've also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren windowframes. Just spare me the pretty ribbons! Spare me this good taste that over there and down there delights the eye and irritates the imagination. Spare me this melody of life that disturbs my own music, which comes into its own only in the roaring of the German workday. Spare me this universal higher level of refinement from which it's so easy to observe that the newspaper seller in Paris has more charm than the Prussian publisher."

First footnote: Kraus's suspicion of the "melody of life" in France and Italy still has merit. His contention here – that walking down a street in Paris or Rome is an aesthetic experience in itself – is confirmed by the ongoing popularity of France and Italy as vacation destinations and by the "envy me" tone of American Francophiles and Italophiles announcing their travel plans. If you say you're taking a trip to Germany, you'd better be able to explain what specifically you're planning to do there, or else people will wonder why you're not going someplace where life is beautiful. Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had existed in Kraus's time, he might have said that Germany is uncool.

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