As parents we carry the blueprints, the dreams of what our family could be. The plans change, the whole thing goes way over budget, there are unexpected additions, and the work never ends. Still, through the messiness of construction we see each othe...
We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to...
Neither the cat nor I missed you while you were gone. It's worse than that. We danced the visitor-gone dance, flinging our feet (and paws) with particular glee. You remember the dance - the one you do after shutting the door behind a difficult visito...
The only part of evolution in which any considerable interest is felt is evolution applied to man. A hypothesis in regard to the rocks and plant life does not affect the philosophy upon which one's life is built. Evolution applied to fish, birds and ...
Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself luc...
The first question we must address deals with optimism, the possibility of achieving our goal. Are we in a position where we can actually hope to effect change? Assuming we become convinced that there are reasons for optimism, we move to the next que...
Hey, Pedro, could you get your shopping cart out of my faculty parking space? Yes, I know you live on the street. But you know how hard it is to find a parking spot on the Upper West Side. After all, you used to be one of my best students! So how's t...
Republics never survive, for their people do not like freedom but prefer to be led and guided and flattered and seduced into slavery by a benevolent, or not so, benevolent despot. They want to worship Caesar. So, American republicanism will inevitabl...
My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping aspects of American society.
[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here.
We [Americans] became a nation of java junkies, wired from dawn to dusk intent on running faster, getting richer, dancing harder, playing longer and getting higher than anybody else.
Billions of dollars worth of research knowledge lie dormant at American universities waiting for the right disruptor to come along and create a business.
In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.
Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.
Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.
The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
When the average American says, “I’m starving,” it is a prelude to a midnight raid on a well-stocked refrigerator or a sudden trip to the nearest fast food restaurant.
It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.
You will also be called upon to provide well-timed distractions. Get the whole country arguing about sex education or gays in the military, and Americans will stop paying attention to all the things they should fear.
Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.
