Table of contents for October 2019 in Reader's Digest

✦ A Chinese sales group made news back in 2016 when it came out that executives forced employees who’d missed their goals to drink a cocktail of grain alcohol and live mealworms. The workers, though disgusted, didn’t seem all that fazed. Said one, “We have also eaten live squid and ants before.” —ECNS.CN ✦ The lumberyard where I worked was experiencing losses from theft. Our vice president ordered polygraphs for every employee. A week later, on a routine patrol, the police caught the thief loading a truck with material from the yard. It was the vice president. —INC.COM ✦ Tania Singer was a renowned neuroscientist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. But she was forced to resign after reports of her…

My Favorite Barista One morning, I told my husband jokingly that he’d dropped the ball because he hadn’t made me coffee and I was having trouble getting motivated to start the day. My five-year-old son overheard me and asked me to explain what “dropped the ball” meant. A few minutes later, he came into our bedroom holding an overflowing coffee mug with a dishcloth underneath it to catch the drips. He said to my husband, “You dropped the ball, but I picked the ball up,” and he handed me the worst-tasting, most watered-down but sweetest cup of coffee ever. —Jennifer Stockberger MOUNT VERNON, OHIO IT WAS LATE one Saturday night in August 1979. My buddies and I were wandering somewhat aimlessly through Greenwich Village in New York City. Looking for…

America the Tasty I admit to being a traditionalist when it comes to Thanksgiving, but seeing the photo of Tofurky in your roundup of favorite foods from all 50 states makes me glad that someone else is enjoying this delicacy. —BYRON PERKINS Rochester, Washington Many people who live in Massachusetts wonder why we are known for baked beans. I’d say clam chowder is our signature dish, you chowdah heads! —JOE DENNEHY Waltham, Massachusetts Everybody loves Ben & Jerry’s, but they are relatively new to Vermont’s food heritage. What about maple syrup—on ice cream, in maple candy, and especially in the seasonal favorite sugar-on-snow (clean, packed snow in a pan with boiled syrup poured in rows and wound onto a fork to eat like taffy)? Don’t forget sour pickles to cut…

DEAR MOTHER GOOSE, My husband recently passed away (killed by our next-door neighbor, baked into a pie, and eaten), and now my son, Peter, is acting out. He keeps sneaking onto this neighbor’s property and stealing his vegetables. I sent him to bed with chamomile tea. His three sisters don’t misbehave this way. Is this just an instance of “Boys will be boys,” or are there deeper issues here that I should be concerned about? —Mama Rabbit DEAR MAMA RABBIT This is a behavioral problem that demands action far beyond chamomile tea. Peter sounds very troubled—understandably so, given what your family has been through. I realize that money may be tight, but you should consider looking for a new place, or perhaps even find friends or family to crash with…

IN 2017, A single sentence reverberated through the Internet, skidding across social media and breathless blogs: “They did surgery on a grape.” And they had! A video showed a tiny robot making delicate incisions in my thin purple skin before pulling back the translucent layer to reveal my juicy yellow-green flesh below. The video was meant to demonstrate the surgical tool’s exacting abilities, but the sheer absurdity of the sentence “They did surgery on a grape” caught on with millions, and I became a nonsensical Internet meme. My popularity long predates my online fame, of course. After all—I also become wine! A resident of North America since before the Pilgrims, my native varieties (including the North American fox and scuppernong) were not great bases for wine, but clusters of me…

✦ Never give up your seat for a lady. That’s how I lost my job as a bus driver. —Milton Jones, COMEDIAN ✦ Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative at the same time. —Dave Barry, HUMORIST ✦ Never answer an anonymous letter. —Yogi Berra, BASEBALL PLAYER ✦ Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper. —Quentin Crisp, AUTHOR ✦ Never get annoyed if your neighbor plays music at 2 a.m. Call him at four and tell him how much you enjoyed it. —Peter Darbo, FILM DIRECTOR ✦ Never get between a female grizzly and one of her young, particularly if he’s just told her that he intends to drop out of college to focus on his band. —Andy G.…

WHEN MY FATHER was growing up in 1930s Brooklyn, every boy in his neighborhood had a nickname. There was Googie and Abie Ashcan (born Abraham Ashkin). Even Dad, a Jew growing up in an Irish neighborhood, had one. He was Murph. Sadly, nicknames seem to be on the wane, and there may be a good reason. In Dad’s day, the pool of names was relatively small. In 1950, there were only about 10,000 names on the Social Security list of those given to five or more babies. In 2018, it was over 32,000, says Pamela Redmond Satran, cofounder of nameberry.com. In past generations, she says, “With more people named John in the same classroom, company, and even family, it became necessary to come up with ways to tell them apart,…

I MET BOSCO IN the remote wilderness near Mount Robson in western Canada. At the end of a long day of backpacking, I had made a lean-to in a clearing beside a stream and was preparing to catch supper. Then I looked up, and there he was: an enormous boar black bear, slowly circling the clearing within 30 yards. He wasn’t Bosco to me yet, and I viewed his presence with trepidation. My provisions were vulnerable if he was in a piratical mood, since I was unarmed. However, I decided to go about my fishing. The bear came along. I’ve lived with wild creatures for 30 years, respecting their first fear—fast movements—so I let him see every slow, deliberate move I made. Soon he was sitting on his haunches less…

It’s October. For everyone’s safety, keep your blond-haired children away from all corn mazes. Do not let them congregate. —@xLiserx I would die first in a horror movie because I refuse to spend the last few minutes of my life running. —@atwistedtiara Any ghost sophisticated enough to haunt a hotel is going to find the 13th floor, whether you have an elevator button for it or not. —@Contwixt How about a horror game show called The Price Is Right Behind You! —@marconi82930 I know blood in horror movies is just corn syrup, but it’s still terrifying because at this point, that’s basically all my blood is. —@bridger_w Every movie is a horror movie when the characters don’t use coasters. —@davedittell…

IT WAS AMERICA’S deadliest wildfire in at least 100 years and the most destructive in California history. The Camp Fire started at 6:33 a.m. on November 8, 2018, touched off by faulty electrical transmission lines in the town of Paradise. It burned for 17 days and consumed 153,336 acres north of Sacramento. In all, the fire caused $16.5 billion in damage, destroying nearly 19,000 buildings, leaving 50,000 homeless, and killing 85. The beauty of this beautifully named place was gone. Shane Grammer grew up 15 miles away in Chico, and he followed the news of the fire’s deadly path from Los Angeles, where the 47-year-old father of three works as a creative director for Disney’s theme parks. Grammer still has friends in the Paradise area. When his childhood buddy Shane…

Why would you want to become famous for being a terrible writer? It sounded to me like a great title to have—if you just win it once. I first entered in 2006 and then got a dishonorable mention in 2013. That means you’re just bad enough to make the cut. Does writing badly come naturally to you? In fact, my English grades were quite appalling. Bad writing comes in a flash of un-brilliance, but it takes a bit of craftsmanship. You want to cringe and laugh at the same time. The trick is to find the simile that doesn’t work or the metaphor that is so bad it makes you laugh. What’s one of your most cringeworthy lines ever? It was about a woman whose lips were like two plump…

1 Hang a Picture with a Fork DECORATING Having trouble getting your picture-frame wire to catch on the nail in the wall? Use a fork. Place it facing out with the handle sticking skyward and the nail or screw wedged between the middle tines. The fork’s natural contours will cause it to stick out from the wall at a slight angle. Slide the picture wire behind the fork until it reaches the nail, then remove the fork. 2 Reduce Wrinkles Without an Iron TRAVEL If your hotel room doesn’t have an iron, try this trick to get the worst of the wrinkles out: On a flat surface, place a damp towel over the wrinkled clothing and press down to smooth out deep creases. Then hang to air-dry. You can also…

NIGHTMARES TRAIN YOUR BRAIN In two related studies, researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland used brain scans to show that the same brain regions are activated when we experience fear in dreams and in real life. What’s more, people who have scary dreams more often are less afraid of frightening images when they are awake. This suggests that nightmares help us rehearse dangerous scenarios in a safe environment, which helps us know how to handle threats better when they actually occur. Heart-Healthy Diet May Prevent Hearing Loss Over a 22-year period, women who mostly followed the Mediterranean diet or the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet were about 30 percent less likely to develop moderate or severe hearing loss than those who didn’t. Both diets reduce or…

BOND OF BROTHERS WALTER MACFARLANE, 76, and Alan Robinson, 74, have been friends for more than 60 years. They grew up a few miles away from each other in Honolulu and met in sixth grade. They played high school football together. They are so close, they’re Uncle Walter and Uncle Alan to each other’s kids. So imagine their surprise when they discovered they were in fact biological brothers. “It did feel natural,” Walter says of the revelation. “We knew each other so well.” It came about, as so often happens, by accident. Walter, a retired math and physical education teacher, knew that he had a complicated family tree. His mother had been young and unmarried when she gave birth to him during World War II, and because she couldn’t raise…

✦ In order to look sophisticated for college, I gave myself a perm. The only effect it had on my red hair was to make it look wild and unruly. One day, a classmate asked if I had tried out for the Olympics. I told her no. She said, “Well, you’d make a great torch.” I’ve been Torch ever since. —Denise S. Bright WAYMART, PENNSYLVANIA ✦ In the Army, I was stationed with a guy named Swamper, short for Swampbilly. He explained that he was called that because “they ain’t no hills in Alabama.” —Douglas C. Atkins CARVER, MASSACHUSETTS ✦ Friends of ours had a daughter who went by Mac. Curious, I asked her parents, “How did you come up with Mac?” They replied, “Middle-Age Carelessness.” —William Gent CULPEPER, VIRGINIA…

FROM PSYCHOLOGY TODAY EVERYONE WHO WORKS at NASA or Google or SpaceX got excited about science before he or she was 10 years old,” TV host Bill “The Science Guy” Nye said recently. “This is well documented. If it isn’t 10, it’s 11 or 12. But it ain’t 17, I’ll tell you that much.” You can plainly see the 10-year-old inside Nye, who is now 63, just as you can see the 10-year-old in anyone else who works at the junction where their deep happiness meets the world’s deep needs. Walter Murch, the Oscar-winning film editor who likewise discovered his passion in childhood, followed a twistier—and perhaps more typical—career path than the lifelong science geeks. You can’t do kid stuff for a living, he was told—“kid stuff” in this case…