New Rule: Food companies must face the facts: One container equals one serving. Look, we’re Americans, and that means once we open the bag, there’s no stopping us until we’re licking stray bits of powdered cheese off the carpet. So stop trying ...
It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemb...
While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel...
Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more kn...
The opening line of her last column was: You know you really don’t fit in with the other housewives you meet when the only way you can contribute to a discussion about babies is by saying, “Yes, that’s what my mother used to do.” It went on t...
There's a difference between driving and texting. When your driving your eyes have to be open and on the road watching the cars around you, road signs, and traffic lights. Along with your mind on the road and destination. Which means you are multitas...
If she had loved him, he would have opened windows, allowed all of that precious light of hers in she wanted! If she could tolerate him, he would have donated to every stinking animal shelter in her name, quit his drinking habits completely, and play...
Peter's denial was not just a personal weakness. He was in a leadership position, honored as the one who spoke for the group, and was second in command (when Jesus wasn't around). But his choice to publicly deny his place in the community at the side...
Cole steps forward, his fingers reaching around my shoulders, and kisses me. It is sudden and smooth and soft as air against my lips. The wind whips around us, tugging at the fabric of our clothes, but not pulling us apart. And then it's gone, the co...
He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was...
There's a very generous donation in the parish's future if you make this fast. Ten minutes, at the most." Frowning, the man fumbled open his liturgy. "There's an established rite, Your Grace. Marriage must be entered into with solemnity and considera...
He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, ...
The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the fu...
In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lo...
Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to ...
I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat...
A loud, purposeful knock on the front door froze him in place with his fist over the fabric. “Hey, dude, it’s me. I brought you all four Bloodsport movies. Open up!” Jason’s voice filtered past the front door, and he and Violet flew apart lik...
Love is an art, Berk. Just like painting or music. Some painters draw mere lines, scratches on the canvas and call them art; some paint stars studded skies like van Gogh; or Chopin’s music conquers the hearts of millions while the execrable disco m...
She let her head fall back upon Marius' knees and her eyelids closed. He thought that poor soul had gone. Eponine lay motionless; but just when Marius supposed her for ever asleep, she slowly opened her eyes in which the gloomy deepness of death appe...
She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appea...
For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you ...
