Mark Ray

Your teenage son comes home from school, mutters a few unintelligible words when you ask about his day and retreats to his room to play videogames. Your teenage daughter comes home from school, parks herself in the kitchen and unloads all her troubles in a tsunami of words. In both cases, you struggle to find the right words and the right tone.
What you need, clinical psychologist Dr. Wendy Mogel says, are some voice lessons.

Pastor Larry Stoess and his wife, Kathie, create community one meal at a time.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but some mothers are pretty inventive in their own right. Take Penny Clark. Back in 1982, she sent her 8-year-old son, Joel, around the family's Utah neighborhood selling pancake mix out of a red wagon. This wasn't just any pancake mix, however. It was a version of an old family recipe that called for egg whites, baking soda and vinegar, as the instructions she stapled to each brown paper lunch sack explained.

Joel quickly sold his stock, but Penny decided....

You could say that Rex Tillerson’s path to the corner office began on a portage trail in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario.

As a 14-year-old Scout from Stillwater, Okla., the future Exxon Mobil CEO traveled to the Charles L. Sommers Canoe Base for a 10-day canoeing adventure. But adventure turned to anxiety the first time he tried to portage a canoe from one lake to another; it seems his 115-pound body was no match for a canoe that weighed upwards of 85 pounds.

A quarterly alumni newsletter I wrote for the Boy Scouts of America

On any given Thursday evening, a dozen or more veterans, men and women from every conflict since Vietnam, file into a nondescript conference room in Louisville, Ky.’s Vet Center. They don’t come for therapy or to swap war stories, however. Instead, they come to study and stage scenes from William Shakespeare’s plays.

They’ve been coming for nearly two years, ever since retired Army Col. Fred Johnson convinced ...

In 1977, their first season, the Toronto Blue Jays were the worst team in Major League Baseball. They had won 54 games and lost 107--45 1/2 games behind the New York Yankees, the division rivals who won their 21st World Series Championship that October.

But the Blue Jays were about to unleash their secret weapon: first-year general manager, the Yankees' former coordinator of player development. Knowing he couldn't rely on the sort of marquee, high-dollar talent that filled his former team's roster....

When Emma Morano died in Italy April 2017, she was the world’s oldest person. She was also the last link to the 19th century, having been born in November 1899.

According to a BBC report, the 117-year-old woman’s life “not only spanned three centuries but also survived an abusive marriage, the loss of her only son, two world wars and more than 90 Italian governments.” She credited her longevity to genetics and a daily habit of eating three eggs, one cooked and two raw.

In the company of friends, adolescents are more likely to experiment with alcohol and drugs, commit crimes and drive recklessly. In fact, when other teens are in the car, a teen’s chances of getting into a wreck more than quadruple. Statistics like that explain why graduated driver’s license programs limit teen passengers, but they don’t explain teens’ risky behavior in the first place. It’s like an adolescent version of the chicken-and-egg question....

The first thing you should know about Bob's Red Mill Natural Foods is that there really is a Bob. He's 88-year-old Bob Moore, he started the company with his wife, Charlee, four decades ago, and he still oversees daily operations at the Milwaukie, Oregon, company.

The second thing you should now is that there really is--or rather was--a red mill.

On Sept. 25, 1957, Eagle Scout Ernest Green Jr. and eight other African-American students walked through the front doors of Little Rock’s Central High School and onto the pages of history. Their simple action capped of months of planning, weeks of legal battles, a handful of street-level skirmishes, and a high-stakes showdown between the governor of Arkansas and the president of the United States.

Few had expected the integration

During the first national Scout
jamboree back in 1937, the most
exciting activity was probably
taking in a Washington Senators
game. During the 2013 National
Scout Jamboree, the most
exciting activity was … well, it was
impossible to determine.

Becca Calendo and Amelia Lorenz, housemates at Chicago's Hesed Community Cooperative, love molasses cookies. So last Christmas they used one of the group's three kitchens to whip up several batches of their favorite recipes. Then they enlisted the rest of the community for a blind taste test. "It was very spontaneous--something we thought of that evening over dinner," Calendo says.

But it was more than that; it was an example of what living in an intentional community can be like....

One December day in 1926, James E. West, the first Chief Scout Executive, ran into Bill Hillcourt, a new Supply Service employee. They were standing by the elevator inside BSA headquarters, which was then in New York City.

“Well, my young man, what do you think of American Scouting?” West asked.
Hillcourt, then 26, emigrated from Denmark, where he’d earned the equivalent of the Eagle Scout rank. He shared his thoughts as the men rode downstairs, but he didn’t stop there....

People may dream in color, but they seem to remember in black and white. They think of history as all black-cloaked pilgrims and snow-white Valley Forge winters, as drab and monochromatic as a Mathew Brady portrait or a 1930s newsreel.

The tendency to decolorize the past seems particularly evident in restored historic homes. Walk into a typical antebellum mansion, and you’ll find faded carpets, plain ceilings, and walls that have been whitewashed or painted in muted “colonial” colors. ...