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Perfect Taste and Texture, Gooey-Crispy Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies
Perfect Taste and Texture, Gooey-Crispy Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies

Voilà: My now absolutely all-time favorite, will-eat-the-entire-batch-in-an-afternoon, go-to homemade chocolate chip cookie.

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JournalLeslie FarnsworthFebruary 14, 2024food Comments
Month-in-Review Highlights: January 2024
Month-in-Review Highlights: January 2024

Somehow, January ended. Felt long in some ways, sure, but mostly shockingly short. Nonetheless, I got a lot done and made a good start on tackling my 2024 objectives.

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JournalLeslie FarnsworthFebruary 7, 2024goals, postmortem Comments
What We’re Missing with Beauty: It’s Not in the Products
What We’re Missing with Beauty: It’s Not in the Products

Frankly, we really should apply the principles of healthy eating—what we put into our bodies—to what we put on our bodies.

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ThinkingLeslie FarnsworthJanuary 31, 2024beauty, culture, marketingComment
Ski Like a Witch: The Belalp Hexe in Switzerland
Ski Like a Witch: The Belalp Hexe in Switzerland

The Swiss canton of Valais—specifically the town of Belalp—has a downhill skiing race for which all participants dress as witches (with brooms, even).

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WanderingLeslie FarnsworthJanuary 24, 2024Switzerland Comments
The Best Books I Read in 2023
The Best Books I Read in 2023

I read a lot of books in 2023, but I managed to winnow down my list of the best-of-the-best using four criteria. Here are my five favorites—and several runners-up.

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JournalLeslie FarnsworthJanuary 17, 2024books, literature, reading, CultureComment
Books I've Read: Q4 2023
Books I've Read: Q4 2023

How I rounded out the 2023 reading year, with my favorites of the quarter in bold and links to the rest of the year’s lists.

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JournalLeslie FarnsworthJanuary 10, 2024books, reading, literature, cultureComment
Month-in-Review Highlights: December 2023
Month-in-Review Highlights: December 2023

I spent a portion of the first day of 2024 reviewing my 2023 progress against the goals I’d set for myself—always an interesting reflection point.

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JournalLeslie FarnsworthJanuary 3, 2024goals, postmortemComment
How Lausanne Celebrates the New Year: Burning the Cathedral
How Lausanne Celebrates the New Year: Burning the Cathedral

How does Lausanne in Switzerland celebrate New Year’s Eve? Why, it fake-burns its gothic cathedral, of course.

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WanderingLeslie FarnsworthDecember 27, 2023Switzerland, cultureComment
Staying Old School: A Paean to the Blogs of Yore
Staying Old School: A Paean to the Blogs of Yore

This site very much has the form of an old-school blog. It’ll stay that way as well. Too much to hope that the good old days of blogging could make a comeback?

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JournalLeslie FarnsworthDecember 20, 2023writing, CultureComment
Good People Make Mistakes
Good People Make Mistakes

While bad people make mistakes, good people make them, too. Treating good people like bad people in the face of an error harms them (and us).

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Thinking, Most PopularLeslie FarnsworthDecember 13, 2023Culture Comments
Month-in-Review Highlights: November 2023
Month-in-Review Highlights: November 2023

Checking progress on my current-year goals at the end of November, even though the year still has one more month to go, always feels like looking into the wayback machine.

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JournalLeslie FarnsworthDecember 6, 2023goals, postmortemComment
The Danger of Making Things Too Easy: The Value of Friction
The Danger of Making Things Too Easy: The Value of Friction

While people and organizations have aimed to reduce life friction as much as possible, we might just want to add back in some of it for our own health and wellbeing.

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ThinkingLeslie FarnsworthNovember 29, 2023business, Culture Comments
When Seasons Change, Humans Change: A Reframing
When Seasons Change, Humans Change: A Reframing

SAD or just the season? it seems unreasonable to assume that seasons don’t affect humans when they affect everything else. We live in the atmosphere, after all. Even when we sometimes wish we did not.

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ThinkingLeslie FarnsworthNovember 22, 2023cultureComment
No Feasting, but Fasting: The Swiss Federal Fasting Day
No Feasting, but Fasting: The Swiss Federal Fasting Day

Switzerland doesn’t have a feast of thanksgiving, but it does have the opposite: A day of fasting. Say what? Here’s the full story of the Swiss federal fasting day, including its history and how it’s celebrated.

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WanderingLeslie FarnsworthNovember 15, 2023Switzerland, history, cultureComment
What You Miss if You Never Eat Alone
What You Miss if You Never Eat Alone

Attentively warding off any tendencies toward creeping bad eating habits and keeping an eye out for “alone” turning into “lonely” mean, in my thinking, that eating alone has far greater benefits than it does risks.

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ThinkingLeslie FarnsworthNovember 8, 2023food, culture Comments
Month-in-Review Highlights: October 2023
Month-in-Review Highlights: October 2023

Much accomplished on several fronts—and just in time, as my hibernation season indeed set in toward the end of the month, when autumn settled in Lausanne.

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JournalLeslie FarnsworthNovember 1, 2023goals, postmortemComment
Day Trips from Strasbourg: France, Germany, and Switzerland
Day Trips from Strasbourg: France, Germany, and Switzerland

You’ll have more than plenty to see in Strasbourg—and if you have enough time, I’d recommend you visit other cities and sites in the region as well!

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WanderingLeslie FarnsworthOctober 25, 2023travel, culture, France, Switzerland Comments
Scary Creatures from France and Switzerland: A Monster Mash
Scary Creatures from France and Switzerland: A Monster Mash

Seeking French and Swiss monsters? I went on a creature quest and uncovered one good mythical monster story from France and one from Switzerland. And I’m on the hunt for more!

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ThinkingLeslie FarnsworthOctober 18, 2023France, SwitzerlandComment
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