Lauren Cuthbertson Escapes Rabbit-Hole of Illness to Create Ballet’s Alice

“Dancing Alice will complete [her] astonishing comeback from an illness that left her unable to make it out of her bed and wondering if she would ever dance again. Her body simply shut down months after her accession to principal; her doctors diagnosed glandular fever and ‘weeks and weeks would go by in a complete fog’.”

How Borders Lost Its Mojo

“Even though the region had several well-established independent booksellers at the time, the Borders “experience” promised the hand-selling of independents with the wide selection of Kmart. As the landscape evolved in the digital age, that cozy, caffeine-scented solicitude gave way to the uniformity of all national chains and Borders lost its distinctiveness.”

Blame Reading

Long before 1949, when the term “ergonomics” was coined, doctors blamed reading for health hazards including (to quote one 1795 authority) “weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, hemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria and melancholy.”