[opening narration immediately after the title sequence] Brian Johnson: Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois, 60062. Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever i...
Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can re...
I stayed in bed for over an hour looked at things on my phone I felt slightly anxious about nothing particular I walked downstairs and poured coffee into a jar I asked a person on the internet if I should take drugs I took drugs before the person had...
Earlier that day, a typewriter bomb had exploded at a black market skin house over on Eel Street, sending words raining through the cardboard walls of the boudoirs and tattooing copies of the Machinist’s ‘Twelve Terms’ on the bodies of whores a...
Today, specific travel attitudes and methodologies are as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date. Which is absurd. It's absurd when it means visiting only the most famous cities and landmarks, strictly hewing to the instructions of the l...
Most Like an Arch This Marriage BY JOHN CIARDI Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace. Mass made idea, and idea held in place. A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds. Most like an arch—two ...
It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thoug...
Consider this, my son: this earth-life is a little time, of which a third is spent asleep. What went before it, and what cometh after, are a long time--verily a time too long for measurement. Shall we be of the herd who say that dreams are a delusion...
Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and th...
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main ca...
This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a ges...
In its various forms, so far as we know them, Love seems always to have a deep significance and a most practical importance to us little mortals. In one form, as the mere semi-conscious Sex-love, which runs through creation and is common to the lowes...
Zu früh, befürcht ich; denn mein Herz erbangt Und ahnet ein Verhängnis, welches, noch Verborgen in den Sternen, heute Nacht Bei dieser Lustbarkeit den furchtbarn Zeitlauf Beginnen und das Ziel des läst'gen Lebens, Das meine Brust verschließt, mi...
The single most important human insight to be gained from this way of comparing societies is perhaps the realization that everything could have been different in our own society – that the way we live is only one among innumerable ways of life whic...
You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun'...
Recognizing that God has called you to function as his agent defines your task as a parent. Our culture has reduced parenting to providing care. Parents often see the task in these narrow terms. The child must have food, clothes, a bed, and some qual...
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I ...
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediari...
In German one of the terms for imagination is the compound word Einbildungskraft: literally, the "power ( Kraft)" of "forming ( Bildung)" into "one (Ein)." Here I want us to reflect about faith as a kind of imagination. Faith forms a way of seeing ou...
We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 millio...
Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: tha...
