If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature, accept the gift as if it were one you had chosen. Say the accustomed prayers, oil the hooves well, caress the small ears with praise. Have the new halter of woven silver embedded with jewel...
Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is...
In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosop...
John Bender: [Imitating his Father] Stupid, worthless, no good, goddamn, freeloading son of a bitch. Retarded, big mouth, know-it-all, asshole, jerk. [Imitating his Mother] John Bender: You forgot ugly, lazy and disrespectful. [Father's voice] John B...
I took the thin magazine from the pouch in front of me and began to thumb through it. I felt self-conscious, as if I shouldn't be there. My mind began to wander, as I knew it would, back to the boonies. I was on patrol again. Monaco was on point. Pee...
The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a ‘liberal’ state is at war with a ‘totalitarian’ state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a govern...
If you believe in the eighteenth century view of the mind, you will look and act wimpy. You will think that all you need to do is give people the facts and the figures and they will reach the right conclusion. You will think that all you need to do i...
If someone had told Allie that she would commit a premeditated act of murder, she would not have believed it. She would have spouted off all the reasons how she could never be capable of such a thing—that no matter how dire the circumstances, she w...
It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still wi...
There is voluminous evidence that exclusive reliance on heuristic processing tendencies of Type I sometimes results in suboptimal responding (Baron, 2008; Evans, 2007a; Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; Johnson-Laird, 2006; Kahneman & Tversky, 197...
For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to maj...
Standing Deer As the house of a person in age sometimes grows cluttered with what is too loved or too heavy to part with, the heart may grow cluttered. And still the house will be emptied, and still the heart. As the thoughts of a person in age somet...
Caden Cotard: I wanted to ask you, how old are kids when they start to write? Madeleine Gravis: Listen, there's an absolutely brilliant novel written by a four year old. Caden Cotard: Really? Madeleine Gravis: 'Little Winky" by Horace Azpiazu. Caden ...
A few years ago, when I was hitchhiking through Laramie, Wyoming, I met an old and infertile man named John. I told him, “I think I’d have made a good son, John. But I’d have made an even better Johnson.” He nodded as he took a long drag from...
