Tungsten is something of a paradox. It has the highest tensile strength of any pure element, making it extremely difficult to pull apart. But the Mead Metal website notes, “In terms of impact strength, tungsten is weak—it’s a brittle …

Flowers don’t have to be in bloom to be beautiful, says famed landscape designer Piet Oudolf. Even in the dead of winter, the Dutch gardener’s award-winning designs are known for their stunning appeal. “Beauty is in so many things you…

The teenager stood her ground. While her high school group was visiting a home for people in rehab from addictions, Claire engaged in conversation with a twentysomething man who towered over her in size. They talked about faith.
Claire clearly presente…

Visiting Switzerland had been my dad’s lifelong dream. After his diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia, my mom decided to go with him while he was still physically able. “One day, with the snow blowing around us on Mount Titlis,” she s…

The ceiling of London’s Banqueting House is magnificent. Painted by Sir Peter Paul Rubens between 1629 and 1634, it was commissioned by King Charles I to glorify his family’s reign. In one painting, the goddess Minerva celebrates the achiev…

When Melanie began having regular headaches, her doctors discovered she had a benign tumor in her pituitary gland. The tumor was about the size of a plum and was surgically removed in 2003 and again in 2006 when it recurred. Then in 2017, when it came …

A restaurant employee discovered an unconscious man beside a dumpster. He was sunburned, bitten by ants, and showed signs of blunt force trauma. He had no memory of who he was. The man, later self-named “Benjamin Kyle,” lived in limbo for m…

I was putting my grandson to bed during a sleepover. When his Bible bookmark opened to Psalm 23, he objected, “We already read this one.” After I suggested we might learn something new, he read aloud, “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack …

One moment Adrián Simancas was kayaking in the Strait of Magellan in Chile with his father. The next, the twenty-four-year-old was engulfed in the mouth of a humpback whale. “I thought I was dead,” Adrián told a news outlet. A…

If you’ve ever heard the expression “albatross around my neck”—a phrase referring to a tiresome burden—you’ve heard an allusion to English poet Samuel Coleridge’s famous poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the…