No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’ ‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too f...
Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a herm...
It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman d...
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave th...
Given the reality of unintended parenthood and parental unhappiness, one would think that women and men who make the decision not to have children - who are deliberate and thoughtful about the choice to bring another person into the world - would be ...
Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of s...
I'd been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew...
Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get ...
After weeks on the road, listening to a language you don’t understand, using a currency whose value you don’t comprehend, walking down streets you’ve never walked down before, you discover that your old “I,” along with everything you ever l...
Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable abo...
[first lines] Michael Corleone: [voiceover] My dear children: It is now better than several years since I moved to New York, and I haven't seen you as much as I would like to. I hope you will come to the ceremony of papal honors given for my charitab...
Scribble out the world since it was not to your liking and make up a new one, something better.
In the world union, prosperity is a science, self-interest a new religion, peace is at hand and the future has never looked brighter.
This was a new skill she'd acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.
Embraced in Isaac’s wings, I decided that change wasn’t such a bad thing. It actually gave flight to a whole new world I couldn’t wait to explore.
For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.
When it comes to world news, attitude is what marks the distinction between justice and vengeance. Justice is pure, but vengeance brings more ruin.
But then I was young, and to be young means to undertake to demolish the world and to have the gall to wish to erect a new and better one in its place.
For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.
Nothing in this world, is completely new. That's why we study history and compare today, with the past. In the end, every human being, has the same way of thinking.
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
