By Ben Fanning, contributing editor | What time of the day does your personal productivity naturally decrease?
According to the Daily Mail, the most unproductive time in the work day is 2:55 p.m. Interestingly, that’s also when social media usage spikes.
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | Legislators shouldn’t get sidetracked by a narrow, right-wing effort to push new anti-gay legislation through the General Assembly. There’s too much vital work that needs to be done — from a real fix for potholes in roads and substantive reform for ethics laws to improving education, providing better health care and reducing poverty.
By Tom Ervin, guest columnist | Several years ago, my wife and I drove to Athens to the University of Georgia campus to watch my daughter receive her master’s degree in communications. After the graduation ceremony, we enjoyed a leisurely lunch together at a downtown restaurant. Then, my daughter shocked me by asking: “Dad, what’s your best advice for me now?”
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | We’re surrounded by rules. They’re what make the world go round without everybody stepping all over everybody else.
Some rules are overt: Speed limits, no murdering others, pay taxes, don’t hit your little sister. Some of them are more covert: You don’t tell the lady next to you at church that her dress or hairstyle is horrible. You don’t laugh out loud when some guy says something monumentally stupid.
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | There’s something about the children’s narrative of Winnie the Pooh that seems to be a good fit for South Carolina’s legislative leaders.
In one Pooh book inspired by creator A.A. Milne, the timid Piglet remarks, “Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
By Ben Fanning, contributing editor | The most important moment of your day is your first minute at your desk. Choose wisely how you spend it. It can mean the difference between a huge infusion of positive momentum or getting sucked down the rabbit hole into a day of non-stop fire drills and chaos.
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | South Carolina’s Fritz Hollings warned the nation 22 years ago. The canary in the coal mine, he cautioned Washington policymakers that the North American Free Trade Agreement was Not A Free Trade Agreement in the nation’s best interest.
He predicted job losses that would force hundreds of thousands out of work, particularly in manufacturing.
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | Lint is not something I ever figured I’d write about. But that changed after what I found in our family’s dryer recently.
About a month ago, I started worrying about lint in the dryer. I don’t know why — perhaps I saw something in the news about a dryer fire. Maybe there was an ad on TV about some kind of newfangled lintbuster. Whatever the trigger, I went to a store to buy something to help suck the lint out of the dryer hose, but couldn’t find anything.
By Andy Brack | Writer Pat Conroy, who died Friday night, had a way with words that can only be described as an incredible gift. Perhaps no one more aptly painted word pictures of love, loss, beauty, yearning, pain, grief and aspiration.
Whether fiction or memoir, Conroy could tell a story like no one else. Just read his ebullient description of the inimitable author and chef Nathalie Dupree, the subject of the first chapter of his cookbook, The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life
By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | The brouhaha over the next person who will sit on the U.S. Supreme Court is a political game of chess in which the people are being used as pawns.
Unless you’ve been asleep under a rock, you know the issue started with the unexpected recent death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Within hours, leading Republicans in the Senate said they wouldn’t confirm any nominee sent by President Barack Obama because they thought it was a job for the new president next year.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina! (2019) by editor and publisher Andy Brack offers incisive commentaries on the American South, politics, the common good and interesting South Carolina leaders. Available exclusively for Kindle for $7.99. A paperback version will be ready soon. Learn more.
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