Other generations faced big challenges: the Industrial Revolution with its sweeping social and economic changes; abolishing slavery; defeating fascism; establishing civil rights for all. The generations now alive must solve the 'money problem'. We mu...
Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses ficti...
And visitors say: how does such a big city exist? What keeps it going? Since it's got a river you can chew, where does the drinking water come from? What is, in fact, the basis of its civic economy? How come it, against all probability, ? Actually, v...
Goodbye. Goodbye. I can't feel you anymore. The night is almost too beautifully pure for my soul to contain. I walk with my arms spread open under the big fat moon. Heroic weeds rise up from the cracks in the sidewalk, and the colored lights of the H...
Why would the US try to win a war? War is an assembly line of death that is highly profitable for politicians and weapons manufacturers. An ongoing war is a conveyer belt of cash. Once your war is won, the assembly line has stopped and the big money ...
We've got so much in this life that all we know how to do is want more. So we concentrate on the wrong things--things we can see--as being the measure of a person. We think if we win something big or buy something snazzy it'll make us more than we ar...
Promise me, man. If anything ever happens to me, promise me you'll take care of Angelina. She's something special, Micah. Heart way too big for her own good. I worry because she doesn't see everyone for who they are. She's too busy looking for the go...
To some people, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of three or four big fan-jet engines rising in pitch, as the plane they are sitting in swivels at the end of the runway and, straining against its brakes, prepares for takeoff. The v...
The road of life is paved with daily successes, a great number of them penny and nickle triumphs. Sadly, these little feats are often seen as worthless―even failures―because we dream of greater gain. Our greed keeps us focused on a gleaming pot o...
Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Sunday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always ...
It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with co...
You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the dif...
All of the emotions that hit people at times like these, all of them, were coursing through us both like a secret we couldn’t tell. Because if we said everything we were thinking and feeling right then…if we laid it all out for one another…we m...
from Pearls and Poison… “In two minutes the cops are going to come barreling though that door,” I whispered to Auntie KiKi hoping to get her mind off the body in the back room. “Any suggestions how we tell these workers out here their candida...
Well," Ben went on,"someone should just tell her to come on home, because she can find the world's largest balls right here in Orlando, Florida. They're located in a special display case known as 'my scrotum.'" Radar laughed, and Ben continued. "I me...
Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it's no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there's no room for deviation from the norm. It's import...
Breast milk is big business." My mother uses my sarcasm as a springboard for her insanity. "We should consider opening a shop that caters to that market. We can call it 'The Milk Bar' or 'Mother's Milk'." ...Ethan slaps his hand on the counter. "We c...
Sammy, wouldn’t you like to add up to something? In the future? Amount to something?” “Naw. I just figure to roll on, stackin’ days, you know, till the day I fuck up big enough the future gets canceled. Or else all planned out for me, maybe. ...
He says, "But it is really whatever, you know? You've saved me way more times. And we call ourselves friends." It doesn't matter what we call ourselves, really. "You already saved me," I say. "That was nothing." "I'm not talking about the cave." He w...
I had the feeling she was going to say something big. One of us had to say it. What happened to us? Where are we going? It was like this silence between us was frozen and we were both feeling our way around it. How is it that two people can need each...
...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies r...
