Lisa Find Love

Running outdoors

“I always recommend picking sunscreens with mineral active ingredients over a chemical sunscreen, as they are less irritating and offer excellent broad spectrum coverage,” says Samer Jaber, MD, of Washington Square Dermatology in New York City. “My favorite is Vanicream SPF 35 Sport Sunscreen. It has zinc and titanium, is great for sensitive skin, and it’s non-irritating, as it free of dyes, fragrance, masking fragrance, lanolin, parabens, formaldehyde, and other preservatives.” (Not sure what “broad spectrum” means? Here’s how to decode your sunscreen label.)

Soak in milk

“Soaking in milk will have a drawing effect on a burn—it’s due to the pH, fat, and cold temperatures,” says Francesca Fusco, MD of Wexler Dermatology in New York City. If you don’t have enough milk handy to fill up an entire basin, simply soak a washcloth in a bowl of cool milk, then gently lay the milky compresses on the burnt areas of your body. The milk will help create a protein film along your skin that reduces heat, pain, and sensitivity. Want to avoid getting sunburned in the first place? Avoid these common sunblock mistakes.

Motherly love

As a nurse at MetroWest Cancer Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, Karen Mott tried hard to get one patient to open up. But Patrician McNulty usually tried to avoid conversation—unless it was about her nine-year-old son, Stephen. After McNulty went to hospice when her cancer took a bad turn, Mott wondered what would happen to Stephen. He couldn’t live with his father, who had permanent brain damage from a car accident, or any of his mother’s five siblings. McNulty didn’t want him in foster care. So after Stephen’s mother passed away, Mott and her husband, who have three other older children, brought him into their own family and adopted him.

Do you live in a place where people are always going above their call of duty? Help us in our search for Nicest Place in America by nominating it today! If chosen, it will appear on an upcoming cover of Reader’s Digest!

Try to stay awake

If you want to fall asleep faster, think about staying awake. “It sounds counterintuitive, but for those who find it difficult to sleep because they keep worrying about not falling asleep, do the opposite,” says Sujay Kansagra, MD, director of Duke University’s Sleep Medicine program and Mattress Firm’s sleep health consultant. Most of the time falling asleep is an involuntary process that takes virtually no effort on our part, but if we’re anxious, we do things like looking at the clock and calculating how little sleep we’re going to get, which then causes sleep performance anxiety. “Instead of worrying about falling asleep, think about staying awake instead. This often lessens anxiety and gives your mind a chance to relax enough to fall asleep. It’s a technique known as paradoxical intent, a cognitive behavioral therapy technique used to lessen the anxiety around falling asleep,” says Dr. Kansgara.

Why introverts can be leaders

If there’s one person who knows about leadership, it’s executive coach, communications expert, and author Kristi Hedges. She’s spent 25 years working with leaders to help them develop the skills necessary to effectively manage and lead their teams. And, yes, introverts have been included in her training with just as much success as others! In Hedges’ newest book, The Inspiration Code, which hits bookstore shelves this summer, she debunks common myths about leaders. The biggest one: There’s no such thing as a natural-born leader, so introverts are on the same playing field as extroverts. In fact, you’d probably never guess that these famous people are introverts. We talked to Kristi about some of the skills introverts already possess and how they can translate them into sharp, developed leadership skills in the workplace.

When the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on May 30, 1922, the world bore witness to how $2,000,000 in federal funds, eight years of American elbow grease, and 38,000 tons of marble, granite and limestone could result in something truly extraordinary: A very, very expensive typo.

Yes, despite its many merits as a national landmark and work of art, the Lincoln Memorial enshrines what may be the greatest blunder in American monument-making. Step into the Memorial’s interior and turn your attention to the north wall. Chiseled into the stone is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1865, less than two months after the successful passing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his speech, the war-weary president expressed his “high hope for the future” of his drastically changing and bloodied homeland.

Except, not in the Lincoln Memorial. To hear the engraver tell it, Lincoln was more concerned with his “high hopes for the euture.” Visit the Memorial today and you can still see where the bottom of the “E” in “EUTURE” was eventually filled in with slightly off-colored stone to become “FUTURE,” more or less.

Given the time, money, and prestige behind the Lincoln Memorial project, you might think it’s outrageous that such an obvious spelling blunder could make it past so many stakeholders. But the fact is, engraving typos are a shockingly common occurrence, with an even more common explanation: simple, stupid, human error. For further evidence of this, just pop across the Potomac river to Arlington Cemetery. According to a spokeswoman for the cemetery in 2014, at least 4,125 of the field’s roughly 280,000 tombstones were overdue for corrections to the names or dates etched onto their faces. More often than not in these cases, the fault is with the families of the bereaved, who may well miss tiny mistakes when reviewing proofs of the proposed gravestones. At the Lincoln Memorial, chances are an overworked architect signed off on the typo well before the engraver made his mark.

But there’s no use throwing around blame. Anyone who has ever written a report for school or work knows that typos are a force of nature—and maybe we should start embracing them. Take San Francisco. Street names stamped into the cement sidewalks of San Fran are notoriously riddled with misspellings and backwards letters (according to a SFGate report, one woman who lived on Broadway was “flabbergasted” to find the twin misspellings “BRODWAY” and “BROADWEY” stamped onto a single intersection). Local historian Eric Fischer has caught more than 200 of these typos on the streets of ‘Frisco, and you won’t hear him complaining about them. “Errors are really interesting,” he told SFGate. “They’re an indication of process. Perfection doesn’t tell you how it was made. It’s when you see the scratch in a piece of wood that you understand how it was done.”

Perfection doesn’t tell you the true story. This is a sobering point, even in the shadow of great men like Abraham Lincoln. Preserved in majestic marble, it’s easy to forget that Abe himself was as flawed and fragile a human as you, me, or the engraver who botched “future”. Lincoln ate. He slept. He battled depression. And, on more than one occasion, he halted conversation to tell a really long fart joke. Why not inscribe that on his monument, right across from the Gettysburg Address? To see a man at his best and at his worst is to see a man as he truly is—to see the tree itself, and not just the shadow of the tree, as Abe was fond of saying.

No man is a monument unto himself, and no monument need be either. Now isn’t that a view worth preserving for euture generations?