Studying Latin in high school, I was perplexed by the phrase festina lente (“hurry up slowly”). On its face, it’s an oxymoron, but it became an aphorism – and has stuck in my head for a quarter century – because it expresses a profound truth. We should aspire to achieve our goals quickly but without moving so fast that we trip ourselves or drift off in the wrong direction. We must regularly adjust our course and run slowly enough that we don’t run off a cliff or twist an ankle stepping in a rabbit hole....

The founder of Atari has interesting thoughts on how to improve education and prepare students for the future: Nolan Bushnell once almost destroyed his family’s garage. As a youngster in Utah, he went tooling around with a liquid-fuel rocket on a roller skate and things went awry. He (and the garage) survived, and Bushnell went on to be a lifelong innovator — from Pong to Chuck E. Cheese’s…. “If you look at [Steve] Jobs and [Steve] Wozniak, they were makers,” Bushnell said in a phone interview with Wired....

I’m awed by the heroism of “the Fukushima fifty” – the brave men (and women?) working to prevent nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima Dai-Ichi. Their efforts may well prove too little, too late, but that’s no fault of the heroes who fought on, despite the high probability that doing so would kill them: “Five are believed to have already died and 15 are injured while others have said they know the radiation will kill them....

A week ago, I attended a lecture on fatherhood with other fathers at my son’s school. The lecturer has been an educator for decades and run school systems and Greenwich Country Day School. He was quite interested in and well read on issues of genetics, nurture (family & parenting), and culture (social influences) as they relate to child development. But he opened the Father’s Workshop by saying males are not biologically inclined to raise children, except perhaps in the earliest months....

In an article full of shocking examples, [Matt Taibbi writes](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall- street-in-jail-20110216?print=true), “Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.” He explains that no one on Wall Street (aside from Madoff) has gone to jail because Wall Street owns our government and the agencies that exist to regulate Wall Street and punish financial crimes: A former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer....