I remember teaching from Hans Rosling, professor of international health, about how we score worse than chimpanzees in answering global trends. Not terrible enough? Gosh, that's worse than random . In spite of the hard fact that people living in extreme poverty has halved over the last 20 years, more than 90 percent of online polls perceived that the extreme poverty rate has either doubled or remained more or less the same.

In short, we don't see how things are getting better.

What exactly,

It's hard for me to relive the experience of the Globe Theatre, and it's easy to see why. That was an open-air theatre in which William Shakespeare drew huge audiences four hundred years ago.

And I did, pretty much recently, turning page after page of the novel How to Stop Time , following the footsteps of its narrator Tom Hazard who had hardly aged a day. He wasn't allowed to join Facebook because "there isn't the option of putting 1581

"It’s a Fitbit. You sync it with your computer, and it tracks your physical activity.”

It was the last answer I expected from a description of a wristwatch. Being a Luddite myself, I first learned about Fitbit from David Sedaris’s essay Stepping Out .

That gizmo sounds like our smartphone pedometer app that tracks walking, plus a push notification after certain milestones.

As David Sedaris points out, many people, and I happily include myself among them, like the push signal or tingle because it

If you can't list your dinner table a tech-free zone without buzzing cell phones in this digital era, try your luck on the bike trail with your kid.

This is exactly what I did last weekend after reading Jonathan McKee's 52 Ways to Connect with Your Smartphone Obsessed Kid . I didn't ride a tandem bike with my daughter; we rode our own bikes, with only short distance between us, and ventured out on long stretches of road.

No matter how tech sucks us in

Choosing the right smartphone has never been difficult. Picking the right age for a child to own one is.

We all agree that there has been a mass exodus of children from outdoor free play to the glowing screens of smartphones or tablets. The American Academy of Pediatrics has for years urged parents to limit tech time for young children, simply because unstructured, unplugged play is the best way for them to think creatively, to problem solve, to develop communication and reasoning skills.

In no way do I advocate giving our innocent

Raise your hand if you have ever felt offended when your mail goes unanswered. Keep your hand in the air if you have not given a hoot to answer mails.

Time and again, I'd fallen into the same trap of "read and no reply." Most of us are not born with willingness to reply mail; I am no exception. And it's even worse when there's page after page after page of mails pouring in.

It surprised the heck out of me when I heard that

Highly committed runners have much higher levels of narcissism than less committed ones. That's what I learned from Jason Karp who wrote The Inner Runner . He is right that running can sometimes be an experience of egoism.

Am I narcissistic? Well, I don't know. It's hard to say but there's a good chance that I am.

If there is one thing I know about my addiction with runner's narcissism more than a VO 2 max number, it is that I joined Strava

I can't imagine an author who writes better memoir than Bill Bryson.

I learnt so many and laughed so much when I read his story of being a newspaper boy at the age of eleven. That's tough, think about it, to deliver the afternoon papers six days a week, and then get up on Sundays before dawn and deliver the Sunday papers too. The reason, Bill Bryson writes, is to allow the regular morning paperboys enjoy a day off each week.

All this was fine - or