Last summer, in London at least, the hoodie was transformed from a benign piece of leisurewear into a uniform for the disaffected, the angry, the malevolent. So much so that ‘hoodie’ was no longer a piece of clothing. It was a whole person. A hoo...
The years passed. Untouched by age, he lived and did as his creator had suggested. Victim after victim, drink after drink, he tried to stop his hunger; however, it did not last for long. The tingling ache of emptiness crawled up from his gut until he...
As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, pol...
All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock the...
You are to consider that a certain melancholy and often a certain irascibility accompany advancing age: indeed it might be said that advancing age equals ill-temper. On reaching the middle years a man perceives that he is no longer able to do certain...
And I shuddered at the apparent freedom so many women felt simply to take what they wanted without regard for other women's feelings. It was as though we were all crazed customers at some kind of year-end shoe sale, shoving our fellow females out of ...
But Harry . . . even if we had met and married three years ago, you’d still say it wasn’t enough time.” “You’re right. I can’t think of a single day of my life that wouldn’t have been improved with you in it.” “Darling,” she whisp...
Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s ...
Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH: A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'd By your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shad...
I hated you,” she continued, “because you have done nothing more than abide by rules that every gentlewoman follows every day of her life. Yet for this prosaic feat, you are feted and cosseted as if you were a hero.” She felt nothing as she spo...
For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes,...
Ah, Antonio, it IS the noblest sport that ever was. I would give a year of my life to see it. Is the bull always killed?" "Yes. Sometimes a bull is timid, finding himself in so strange a place, and he stands trembling, or tries to retreat. Then ev...
In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civ...
Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime. As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and et...
What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on ...
Not many years before the Happening, one of your country's largest religious bodies officially declared that their book was holier than their God, thus simultaneously and corporately breaking several commandments of their own religion, particularly t...
The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless....
When I was a teenager I took freedom for granted until I got through the army and saw what the Nazis had done in Germany. Then I realized that freedom isn't automatic; it has a price. World War II was a justified and necessary war. Last year I met fi...
Because there is no way to know the gender of an intersex baby, experts recommend that intersex children be allowed to manifest their natural, innate gender, which may be witnessed as early as two years of age, usually by age three, and almost univer...
One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I went as a hobo. It's a word you don't hear anymore. Along with 'tramp,' it's been replaced by 'homeless person,' which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, t...
The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then...
