Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glo...
Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the...
We buy a bottle of water in the city, where clean water comes out in its taps. You know, back in 1965, if someone said to the average person, 'You know in thirty years you are going to buy water in plastic bottles and pay more for that water than for...
I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library t...
This year I guess I decided in the bigger matches to take it more to my opponent instead of waiting a bit more for the mistakes. Yeah, this is I guess how you want to win Wimbledon, is by going after your shots, believing you can do it, and that's wh...
Obama hasn't lost his standing because of tricks played by the Republicans. He hasn't lost his standing because the media's not fair to him. He hasn't lost his standing or his approval number because the media spent four years attacking him like they...
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking...
She knew that what she was going through was nothing special, just garden-variety heartbreak, the sort of thing that poets and novelists had been writing about for hundreds of years, but she also knew, from those same books, that there were people wh...
Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a ramb...
Canoeing was hard and scary, and the wind could blow you across the lake if you did it wrong. After a year of not doing it right, I could talk to people and get them to sit up straight, take different kinds of chances, to breathe differently, to enga...
I had a few problems. I didn't realise it until I started going to therapy. I did it for 10 years, two days a week, and pretty quickly I understood that a lot of my suffering, many of my issues, were rooted in my realising that I was gay when I was a...
I have been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). It's a terminal disease with an average lifespan of two to five years post-diagnosis, and scientists don't know what causes it. ALS prevents your brain from talking to your muscles. As a...
Wait, the most positive and infinite word ever made. It can be for a moment,for a min,for an hour,for days, for years, for eternity ... and sometimes for another life .. But it never fails and never ends. One always waits for something or someone ......
Instead of protesting and cursing others because they write "X-Mas" instead of "Christmas"; try being Christmas. Live Christmas. Breathe Christmas. Act Christmas. Speak Christmas. Reflect Christmas. Listen and feel Christmas Christ doesn't care how y...
It was the time of year when migrating crows wheeled across the sky, thunderous flocks that moved like a single veil, and I heard them, out there in the wild chirruping air. Turing to the window, I watched the birds fill the sky before disappearing, ...
And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. 'This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?' So I was, then I was ...
He had also spent a day and a half without sleep trying to start an online petition to bring back the advert for Nationwide Building Society which said Dunroamin, twice, but half the through the second day of the campaign he had realised that it was ...
Before doing fieldwork in Middle Egypt, I analyzed satellite imagery to determine exactly where I wanted to go. Within three weeks, I found about 70 sites. If I had approached this as a traditional foot survey, it would have taken me three and a half...
We've found that patterns of site looting have increased between 500 and 1000 percent since the start of the Arab Spring. Now this is a problem as old as human beings. People were looting tombs 5,000 years ago in Egypt as soon as people were buried, ...
I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology—that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. It led to the widespread belief that the only way to achieve justice wa...
I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12...
