In medieval times, contrary to popular belief, most knights were bandits, mercenaries, lawless brigands, skinners, highwaymen, and thieves. The supposed chivalry of Charlemagne and Roland had as much to do with the majority of medieval knights as the...
The many contradictions in our lives – such as being home while feeling homeless, being busy while feeling bored, being popular while feeling lonely, being believers while feeling many doubts – can frustrate, irritate, and even discourage us. The...
Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, 'Prove that you are a good person.' Another voice says, 'You’d better be ashamed of yourself.' There also is a voice that says, 'Nobody really cares about you,' and one that says, 'Be s...
The French fairy tale writers were so popular and prolific that when their stories were eventually collected in the 18th century, they filled forty–one volumes of a massive publication called the . Charles Perrault is the French fairy tale writer w...
...we begin to understand marriage as the insistently practical union that it is. We begin to understand it, that is, as it is represented in the traditional marriage ceremony, those vows being only a more circumstantial and practical way of saying w...
each year India produces thousands upon thousands of eighteen-year olds who have little to no instructed idea of the last sixty years of Indian history. They have no idea if or how those five-year plans worked. They have no idea if or how the Non-Ali...
The Universe was a damned silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for its existence was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that some abstract somethings "just happened" to be some atoms that "just happened" to get tog...
Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. E...
Middling monsters died at the point of pitchforks, burned with torches, or at the butt of silver-capped canes wielded by angry, geriatric Poles. Middling people were dime-a-dozen, emptied souls, shorn sheeple, human husks. A good monster didn’t wor...
Before I lost my father, I never understood the rituals surrounding funerals: the wake, the service itself, the reception afterward,the dinners prepared by well-meaning friends and delivered in plastic containers, even the popular habit of making pos...
I love you , Valentine’ is actually a popular phrase used in greeting cards.” If you were sending me one, what would it say?” he asks. I love you, too, Roman.” And there it is, words that I dread to say and do mean, because with them comes th...
We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of tooth...
It is always worth asking questions, especially in regards to the ingenuity of local marketers around the world. From uncovering the truth cloaked by sly names of regional specialties such as ‘Rocky Mountain oysters,’ to the inadvertent discovery...
(Popular singer Eddie Fisher, appearing on This is Show Business, told Kaufman that women refused to date him because he looked so young.) Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four time...
I'm not saying that suffering is our fault. I believe we suffer because sin has taken hold of the world. And with sin comes selfishness and heartlessness and wickedness. But I also think there will be a day of reckoning, Nick, when God lays out all w...
[longer introduction to "Dance of the Hours"] Narrator: Now we're going to do one of the most famous and popular ballets ever written: the "Dance of the Hours" from Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda". It's a pageant of the hours of the day. We see firs...
radio announcer: So here we go with Voice of America. News for Southeast Asia. It's 6:45 and a partly cloudy morning here. Clouds too in Washington. President Nixon has announced that he will address the nation on the Water Gate case within the next ...
Jeff Bebe: Some people have a hard time explaining rock 'n' roll. I don't think anyone can really explain rock 'n' roll. Maybe Pete Townshend, but that's okay. Rock 'n' roll is a lifestyle and a way of thinking... and it's not about money and popular...
You see that girl over there? The one being picked on? Do you know whose fault it is that she's being picked on? Society. Just because she doesn't look and dress a certain way makes her different. Like how dare she be different?! No, how dare you pic...
At this very moment you are probably basing your value on how other people value you, even though most of the time, you don’t even know what these people really think. You are assuming what they think based on behavior you interpreted. In truth, mo...
Two people whose opinion I respect told me that the word "Christian" would turn people off. This certainly says something about the state of Christianity today. I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it ...
