Ask the Expert
We filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy. How long do we have to wait before we can get a mortgage? Probably a good deal less time than you think. The number most…
Author: Rick Good
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader's money, real estate, and business coverage.
New homes stopped shrinking. The rooms didn’t stop changing.
For most of the past decade, the story about new houses was that they kept getting smaller. That story is over, and not because anyone started building…
She had already told everybody yes
The hardest part was not turning down Elvis Presley. It was that she had already told everybody yes. Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1973…
You are not wasting the AI’s time
New users often apologize to AI. They type “sorry, give me a minute” before stepping away from the keyboard, the way you would to a colleague standing at…
The accommodation that costs nothing
When an employee asks for a workplace accommodation, a supervisor’s first thought is usually a number. Equipment to buy. Construction to schedule. A…
The dignity is in the doing
We tend to assume that meaning comes bundled with the job — that the title, the salary, or the prestige decides whether the work matters. A well-known…
Your photos survive a lost phone, but not a wrong tap
Drop your phone in a lake and your photos are fine. Hand that same phone to a grandchild who taps the wrong thing and they can vanish from every device…
A houseplant that glows without a light bulb
You can buy one. The Firefly Petunia, sold by an Idaho company called Light Bio, looks like an ordinary white petunia in daylight and gives off a soft…
New floating metal will not sink
Engineers at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics have made an aluminum tube that will not sink. Punch it full of holes, hold it underwater…
Winning the lottery: This guy didn’t need AI. Just math and a pile of money
Beating a lottery has been done, and it was done with a printing press. Stefan Mandel, a Romanian-born mathematician, won 14 jackpots by covering as many…