If bingeing on bad emergency-room-themed television has taught me anything, it's that crisis situations bring out the best and worst in people.

Journalists know that often you don't grab stories, they grab you.

I think that when you talk to people about Monopoly, they love talking about their memories associated with it. And for me, I'm the same way. I mean, when I think about Monopoly, I think of my family playing at the holidays.

I remember, often, when you tell people you're doing a book about board games, they think you're totally nuts. And that might be warranted. But I feel like if we can't get the story of Monopoly right... what hope is there for anything else?

I think that my main business is as a news person.

Women in finance bore the brunt of layoffs more than their male counterparts during the Great Recession in 2008 and were also more likely to have been in back office jobs that were replaced by computers.

London, Ontario, sits halfway between Detroit and Buffalo, a description that applies as much to its soul as to its geographical coordinates.

Football, like boxing, will never go away, just occupy a different role in the American zeitgeist.

While the U.S. government is unlikely to ever limit the number of football games, plenty of parents are refusing to let their children play the sport due to the risk of head injuries.

The fall of Rome seemed unthinkable to people at the time but inevitable to historians reflecting upon it with the benefit of context.

Generations of thinkers have made typewriters their frenemies, and long before there were Gmail inboxes, print correspondence stacked up, some hastily written and impulsive on the steel gadgets.

Virtual reality has an exciting future and oodles of room to grow.

There are good reasons for not wanting to host the Olympics. The Games can be costly and, in spite of their patriotic overtones, can unintentionally expose a nation's weaknesses to the world.

In the modern road-running era, digital photography has intersected with weekend-warrior culture, creating a golden age of social-media humblebragging. For some, the marathon course is sacred ground. For others, it's a personal movie set.

Banning sports is a ludicrous proposition.

Sports fandom transcends gender, race, language, political preference, socioeconomic status, or any other way you can think of slicing this planet.

No one in my family was a journalist, and it didn't seem like a real job. Part of me still doesn't think it is.

It's still thrilling, even if my work is something that people even pretend they're interested in on a first date or at a cocktail party.

I'm a realist about who really reads books and who acts like they read books.

The more I think about the Olympics, even from afar, its mere concept stuns me. I can't think of any other line of work where, every four years, people gather to be ranked one, two, and three, then are more or less told to evaporate until the next go-around.

As it turns out, just hanging out around athletes doesn't actually make one more fit.

Money can be a reflection of our perceptions of power, self-esteem, personal history, fears, and happiness.

Because sports are a religion, it's difficult to imagine a world without the Olympics, and to be sure, they have given us many glorious moments.

I've often wondered if the trade-off for growing up in the relative newness and freshness of the West Coast was befuddlement when it comes to historical preservation. We don't have many old things, and we don't really know what to do with the few that are around when our default response is to compost or field burn.