These days it's cool to be ethnic and to be different, but when I was a kid, it was not cool - at all. My friends would come over and my mom would make crepes with eggs, stuffed with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and spinach. And they'd be like, 'What ...
Having to go through an intervention and family counseling is a wonderful experience. I would almost recommend it to anybody. It opens a lot of communication, and it opens old sores, but once it is opened and hashed out, the rewards are far greater.
In truth, Wall Street is in for a radical makeover. Fewer people, lower margins, lower risk, lower compensation - and ultimately, fewer talented people. It is likely to change the culture of an industry that for nearly a century has been the money ce...
Mythopoeia has taken off in the Indian diaspora because there has been a change in readership from a mature audience to a younger one. This lot has a desperate yearning to reconnect. They want to consume mythology but in a well-packaged and easily di...
I have to entertain, because if I don't entertain you, you're not going to continue reading. But if I'm not out to enlighten, or change your mind about something, or change your behavior, then I really don't want to take the journey.
There is a giant gulf between doing something and doing nothing. And someone who makes a lolcat and uploads it - even if only to crack their friends up - has already crossed that chasm to doing something. That's the sea change, and you can see it eve...
Conservatives were sure that if you eliminated welfare for single moms, it would eliminate - or at lease greatly reduce - single motherhood. So in 1996 we had welfare reform. Did not change the trend in the least. Soon half of all babies will be born...
In Britain, it's bred into you, the idea that you can't really change anything, so why bother. When I went to school in America, it was the total opposite view - you, as an individual, can change anything and everything. It's how you're raised.
I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you're frightened of is to make fun of it. That's why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.
Writers generally get into writing because they want to write, not because they want to be independent publishers, and you can't really fault someone for saying, 'What I'm doing right now works, so there's no reason to change it.'
I would say that Barack Obama has always been a real optimist about what can be accomplished. He believes that government can be used to create systemic, long-term, real change. And the first lady is more of a skeptic.
Meat production is one of the leading causes of climate change because of the destruction of the rainforest for grazing lands, the massive amounts of methane produced by farm animals and the huge amounts of water, grain and other resources required t...
Republicans would have preferred the court overturn the health care bill, an act that would have underscored Obama's biggest liability - the perception among voters, including those who like and trust him, that he has been ineffective.
My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.
At a purely practical level, history is important because it provides the basic skills needed for students to go further in sociology, politics, international relations and economics. History is also an ideal discipline for almost all careers in the ...
For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination.
To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like ...
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the m...
Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and confl...
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about...
Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind's eye. That's an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition.
