After 46 years as a journalist (34 years of them writing OpEds for the Washington Post Writers Group), columnist Ellen Goodman is retiring; and she writes a terrific farewell column in yesterday's Washington Post.
Pondering what will be her response to the inevitable "what will you do now?" queries, she considers "coopt[ing] Susan Stamberg's one-word answer when she left her anchor post at NPR: 'Less.'" She is "more tempted to say, simply, 'We'll see.' After 46 years of deadlines," she concludes, "it is time to take in some oxygen, to breathe and consider."
Ms. Goodman recalls a column from three decades earlier, when she had written of another's retirement:
"'There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.'
"'It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out.'
"It was an odd experience to hear, let alone heed, my younger self.
"'The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well,' I wrote back then. 'It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully.'"
So what are Ms. Goodman's final concluding words in this final concluding column?
"[My younger self] knew then what I know much more intimately now," she observes. "So, with her blessing, I will let myself go. And go for it."
Well-done, Ellen Goodman, and godspeed.
Emily writes, “Ever since I was a kid, I have had a love for astronomy. I studied Earth and Planetary Sciences in college and am now in graduate school, studying to be a middle school science teacher. Another love I had as a kid was reading Calvin and Hobbes. My science tattoo combines these two childhood loves — with Calvin and Hobbes looking up at the 8 planetary symbols and the symbols for a star and water. Just like Calvin and Hobbes, I will always be gazing up at the sky with wonder and awe.”
Why bore your fish with a humdrum aquarium when you can house them in the Spillarium, a spherical 5 gallon tank that features color-changing LED lights and a spilling waterfall that plunges into a bigger fish's ceramic maw.
Everyone is clamoring about tablets these days—
BGR
If you're on terra firma, it's pretty obvious when you need to grab your make-out partner. But how, asks Slate's Explainer, do you know when to celebrate "when you're hurtling through time zones at 17,500 miles per hour?"
Late last night, 
