Jeff Gentry

Watch out for those invisible clouds of bad air.

Jeff Gentry discusses how smart people make embarrassing mistakes, highlighting that only the brightest minds make the worst blunders. Epic tragedy occurs when trusting the right people at the wrong time.

In 1978, Chicago native William Kampiles quit as a CIA watch officer after seven months, hoping to prove he should be rehired as a superspy.

Prussian millionaire Heinrich Schliemann didn't believe in God, but he bet everything on his belief in Homer's Iliad.

Lindsey Jacobellis, a 20-year-old snowboarder, lost her balance and fell during the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, resulting in her Swiss opponent winning the gold medal. This incident left her feeling embarrassed and unable to stop thinking about it.

Houston, we have Hubble Trouble

In professional sports, tanking means losing on purpose this season to gain a top draft pick next year. Although it disgraces the integrity of the game, some teams try to lose in order to win.

From ancient Mesopotamia forward, man accepted the divine right of kings: hereditary autocrats who ruled by decree. A proper king doesn’t answer to aristocrats, courts, or parliament; certainly not to the peasantry. He derives his power straight from God.

The fleecing of America: boondoggles, overbudget, behind schedule, cost over-runs. Government contractors wasting taxpayer money. A commonly-told folly is NASA’s million-dollar space pen. Have you heard this one? Author Gary Goodman says: “Astronauts didn't have a pen that could write [in zero-gravity.] NASA invested upward of $1 million to devise a pen that could. [The Russians] faced the same problem, but … solved it for less than a dollar. They decided to use a pencil.” But the million-dollar space pen is not today’s dumb idea. What’s dumb is that this entire story is a myth.

Scotland was once a sovereign nation. How did they lose their independence? Because of a dumb idea.