I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.
During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago.
I was tempted my junior year to go out of college and forgo my eligibility. I had broken several world records. I did have a lot of people telling me that I should go pro.
I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of e...
Most analysts would agree that if all the undocumented immigrants in California were deported in one day, our state would experience a severe economic downturn. This does not even consider the many cultural and spiritual gifts these immigrants bring ...
Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and ...
For the past several years, I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people, like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated an...
We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on h...
You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that ...
And I think of that again as I've written in several of my beauty books, a lot of health comes from the proper eating habits, which are something that - you know, I come from a generation that wasn't - didn't have a lot of food.
I want my testimony to stand on that point. But I would point out that Zona Research Inc. showed we have increased market share among business users, educational users, and government users over the past several months - and that's more recent than t...
Whether you're managing the finances for a household of one, a business of a thousand, or a government of several hundred million, there's no more important statement of fiscal intent you can make than putting together a responsible budget - one that...
It's hard for people to realize now, but my gosh, when I was in school, you could not name a group that was less cool than Kiss. Going in to school with a Kiss T-shirt, you were asking for ridicule. In '77, they were one of the biggest bands in the w...
My disorder has been attended with several symptoms of a consumption; and I have been at times apprehensive that my great change was at hand: yet blessed be God, I have never been affrighted; but, on the contrary, at times much delighted with a view ...
The other thing I like, in fact, several months ago I introduced a bill to end the absurd catch and release policy where our government has been giving tickets, essentially, to people who enter illegally and then letting them go and show up of their ...
What we should care about is health - reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is 'normal.' A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that sepa...
St. Michaels Mount is a favourite place of mine; people will walk across to the Mount all day and assume they will be able to walk home. The spectacle of hundreds of people realising that the path they walked over on is disappearing under several fee...
When I've had enough of words, I go out into the city for a long walk; sometimes I'll go out walking for several miles. And I'll just take photographs and hope for something striking or unusual to happen that I can organize into a picture frame.
I was a precocious only child, and then I went through a fat, awkward stage for several years, so I learned to fall back on my humor and personality when I was growing up. It's how you survive, so I think it was more of a natural progression for me, ...
My senior year of high school, I was voted 'Wittiest.' So, several years later, I decided to try my hand at writing humor to see if I could be witty enough to make some money.
