Do I have any recommendations for a Sadiri boys' night out?" I shrugged, smiled, and allowed myself a laugh. "I can come up with something." I did, too. The Ministry of Culture has all kinds of programmes, and I got someone to put together a package ...
Obituaries are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives. I defy you to find a single obituary that begins, "Jane Doe won the Nobel Prize in large part because she was ad...
While there are certainly informational spillovers as ideas move from person to person, it is hard to see why in most instances they are not priced. Although it is possible to imagine examples such as the wheelbarrow where an idea cannot be used with...
Dr. Blockhead's mocking face was solemn for once. 'Modern science is wiping out deviant strains of the human form,' he said. 'In the twenty-first century, genetic engineering will do more than merely eliminate Siamese twins and alligator-skinned peop...
I have a rule of thumb that allows me to judge, when times is pressing and one needs to make a snap judgment, whether or not some sexist bullshit is afoot. Obviously, it’s not 100% infallible but by and large it definitely points you in the right d...
I had a dream about you. You were guarding a bridge that I needed to cross. You asked if I had the proper paperwork, and I said I did, but I was just missing one signature. I said I couldn’t get it signed because I didn’t have a pen, I only had a...
Sam hauled open the library door. "There you are!" Whit pushed up from the desk he'd been hunched over. "We thought you two had given up on us." "Unlike some people I know," I said, removing my mittens and scarf, "we don't live here." "She says that ...
<...> slaves became the major form of Southern wealth (aside from land), and slaveholding became the means to prosperity. <...> The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,�...
It is widely unknown, but nonetheless true that Catholicism fervently promotes the 'spiritual disciplines' whereas Protestantism has largely neglected them altogether. Does 'volunteerism' facilitate the formation of Christ's character in us or rather...
The man walked past me and stopped, observing the blood running down my neck. "Your injury. Let us tend to it." He looked out through the open doorway and silently gestured to someone out there. "Our world," he said, "is far more advanced than yours....
Unless and until we have peace deep within us, we can never hope to have peace in the outer world. You and I create the world by the vibrations that we offer to it. If we can invoke peace and then offer it to somebody else, we will see how peace expa...
Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow...
But now science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely...
All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of esta...
It was likely her due, then, that a familiar voice halted her progress just as she started to ascend the staircase. “You’ve certainly turned the afternoon on its head.” Lucas regarded her with a wry smile from the first landing, his thick brown...
The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there right from the start in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without unders...
I once asked a rabbi in a large congregation which prayers he used with the dying. "You mean the Mourner's Kaddish?" he asked, referring to the prayer recited on behalf of the deceased. "No," I replied. "I mean the prayers said when a person is actua...
We poetically construct our identity as human beings, together with our values, largely through reciprocal relationships with animals. They provide us with essential points of reference, as well as illustrations of the qualities that we may choose to...
Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new conte...
New Rule: Instead of using their $10 billion atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider to re-create the Big Bang by melting atom parts in temperatures a million times hotter than the sun, scientists should do that. I'm just sayin' it sounds dangerous. I'm ...
[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of ...
