Mary had been chosen, “favored” by God. But what a strange blessing. It brought with it none of the ideals or goals that so consume our daily striving. Today many assume that those whom God favors will enjoy the things we equate with a good life:...
...Usually i’d sit back and just enjoy the view for what it was because it’s not often you come across something so ridiculously out of place, a girl like you, on the subway, it’s like spotting a unicorn at the zoo. I reasoned how to pull this ...
We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to...
Here’s the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes—especially the most verboten and destructive ones—the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whet...
The truth is despite the hard work and juggling required to keep the different facets of the frantic life afloat, the "superwoman" has one marvelous compensation. Being busy and being seen to be busy lets you off the hook. Buys you a way out of all a...
And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the a...
As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists desire a broad comparative basi...
Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs' home: 'I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silve...
Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape somewhere. Well, none of the musicians have played toge...
Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn't even h...
When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much ...
Song of myself A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it ...
By agreeing to these terms and conditions, you will be signing your right to freedom of expression, all artistic credibility, all of your free time and your soul over to us. Do you agree?" I grasped the pen. "Yes." I scratched my name down fast, befo...
She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But most...
She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." , thought Strike, for a second distracted. He had slept badly. , that ...
It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy fragments of fish- the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight. They cleaned up the plates and pans ...
Protestants at one time were confident that their free form of confession was a vast improvement upon Catholic private confession to a priest because it is voluntary, demystified, and not routinized. But amid the acids of modernity it has volunteered...
Why?” I asked him tiredly. “What would it have changed? What could you possibly have said that would have made a difference?” “That I was your brother, Harry,” he said. “That I loved you. That I knew a few things about denying the dark pa...
Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because ...
Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing to do. Marginal costs of additional growth in rich countries, ...
I have never had any difficulty falling asleep. No matter what problems I have. However terrible things are, I can sleep. It's like killing yourself and taking the easy way out. It's waking up that I dread. Every morning, I go through the five stages...
