My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.
No amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of worrying can change the future.
Don't dwell on the mistakes of the past while the mistakes of the future are waiting for you
learn from the past live in the present plan for the future
To me, England is past its sell-by date. It's not the country I grew up in.
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
For all the advances in technology, science and communications, there are signs that we are failing in areas where it matters most: our personal relationships and society in general. The atomisation of society evidenced by the startling increase in r...
I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ...
A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that ...
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.
The relationships among natural and drug-induced alterations of consciousness must be understood from an evolutionary perspective. This reveals altered consciousness to be related to endogenous mechanism, which are triggered by both ancient evolution...
You know cats, always scratching on this or that, but never scratching what you want when you want it. (Like my balls, when they’re itchy!) I recently got him declawed, which sucked for him, but it was great for me because I was tired of always bit...
You wouldn't think that people would believe that we all got so incredibly beat up—in so many interesting ways—from a bear attack. Especially not when Carmel is sporting a bite mark that is a spot-on match for wounds found at one of the most horr...
Dear Natalie, In a recent study conducted by jarodkintz.com, nine out of ten people were more likely to say yes when the salesperson wore pants. The curious thing is that the prospective customers were being sold a foreskin, and only one out of ten p...
As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn’t own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don’t own a TV simply means you’re poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-y...
Time and again our best and brightest have alerted society to looming problems, but our persistent pattern has been to ignore the warnings and suffer the consequences. The pathetic refrain of recent years --'Nobody saw this coming'--is always a self-...
Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a youn...
The recent spate of magazines for "parents" (i.e., mothers) bombard the anxiety-induced mothers of America with reassurances that they can (after a $100,000 raise and a personality transplant) produce bright, motivated, focused, fun-loving, sensitive...
I was recently living more comfortably surrounded by secrets... Like dozens of luxurious satiny pillows, they were embracing me from all directions into safe lulling warmth, thus isolating me from the sharp dead-cold edges of the truth hiding behind ...
Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree...
Lauren realizes right then that the prospect of being single—of recent events leading to a divorce and her being a single mother with child support checks and the like—scares her to death. Dating itself is such a frightening, vulnerable time peri...
