There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someon...
Ironically, tendency to ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence is actually President Reagan's true legacy, as I noted in 'The Nation' back in 2000, before the current right-wing mania for President Reagan gained its full force.
Whether people care enough about local news to pay for it is, sadly, an entirely different question than whether our democracy requires a strong watchdog function at the local level to ensure safeguards against abuse, chicanery, and outright dishones...
If bloggers are to improve our public discourse - helping busy and usually uninformed people make sense of the world - it is necessary to use some sort of standard with which to judge their reliability. Perhaps the answer (strictly advisory) is a bod...
Todas las novedades que la bullen a V. en esa cabecita revolucionaria... serán muy buenas en otros países de Europa o del Nuevo Mundo; lo serán tal vez aquí en mil novecientos ochenta; lo que es ahora... ¡desdichada de V. si se obstina en ir con...
Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I'm still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.
For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.
When I cook with my son, I might chop vegetables and have fun with different shapes. Cooking is a way to teach kids about other things, like reading or math with all of the weights and measures. There are so many things that are part of cooking that ...
I think you have to be careful with spices. Kids' palates can be very delicate, and they might not like things overspiced. In my cookbooks for kids, I do a milder version of my signature spice blend, Emeril's Essence, called Baby Bam, which has no ca...
During the mission, Walter Jones, a team member was given a package containing bone fragments by a Lao. The source said they were from a crash site. He presented photographs showing himself in company with others digging around obvious aircraft debri...
In Europe, you would almost never have people with large amounts of income being happy with a two-volume vehicle like a hatchback or a minivan. They want to structurally show their societal position, which is why three volumes are so popular. They sh...
Relative to most people I know, I am comfortable just about anywhere. I went to 20 schools before the 8th grade because my father couldn't hold a job. We moved every six months. I had to adjust.
It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called ...
George Orwell's '1984' frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it's not a celebration of poetic language. It's decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what...
Because two people in love don't make a hive mind. Neither should they want to be a hive mind, to think the same, to know the same. It's about being separate and still loving each other, being distinct from each other. One is the violin string one is...
Dicen que soy un mafioso, porque mi sentido de la amistad es tal que resulta un poco el de los gánsteres: por un lado mis amigos y por el otro el resto del mundo, con el cual tengo muy poco contacto
If only i could get that under control then i feel like i could stay here a long time, watching the days leaking into the nights, swilling over the buildings, bleeding back again. I could lie and not think of anything but ways to describe the sky, th...
There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine...
In Japan, there are storm channels on either side of the main roads. There were so many times when I'd fall into these ditches because I was lost in stories as I was walking along. It's still dangerous for me to drive. I've driven into the gate outsi...
A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.
'Superbetter' looks more like a social media platform or a social network than a typical video game. You know, there aren't any 3-d spaces to explore. You don't have this avatar that you're building up. It's more about thinking like a gamer.
