The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like ...
(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college...Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.
Laurel, David? Would you like to share the joke with the rest of the class?" he asked, one hand on his skinny hip. "No, sir," David said. "But thank you for asking." The students around them laughed, but Mr. james didn't look pleased. Laurel leaned b...
Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just...
Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class.
When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more ...
The POW camps of North Vietnam were packed with Air Force and Naval Academy graduates. The six midshipmen in my Naval Academy class of 1968 who served as liaisons between the Marine Corps and the Brigade of Midshipmen later suffered nine Purple Heart...
Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the p...
I jabbered too much in class about all the Russian writers whom I admired for being, among other things, uncouth and somewhat humorously melodramatic, such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as it was in my own household when I was growing up.
Even though I knew my way around Facebook, Twitter terrified me. RT? OH? Hootsuite? Huh? My Twitter-savvy friends attempted to explain what a hashtag was, but, still mystified, I signed up for an online Twitter 101 class. Yes. I'm geeky like that.
I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on m...
Everyone today is like, 'Shailene, you're getting so much buzz. How does the feel?' It's the most odd question because it's like asking a kid who got into Cornell how it feels to be the top of your class at one of the Ivy League schools. How do you a...
In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and so...
A girl's life was defined by lines: fine lines, hairlines, bikini lines, class lines, the tightrope line between being a good girl and a slut. But there was always a moment when the lines blurred and a good girl had to decide whether to toe the line,...
We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—why'd they have kids if they ...
I was always the tallest girl in my class, and it made me have really bad posture because I wanted to seem shorter than I really was. It really reflected how I felt about myself. I spent most of my youth in school feeling really insecure about the wa...
I've got a golf scholarship for school, so they understand if I'm away. A couple of years ago they called to see why I wasn't at school, and now they're like, 'oh, she's at golf.' Sometimes I'm in class and sometimes the teachers don't realize I'm th...
Our training is world-class across all the services. We spend an awful lot on every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman that comes in, and we ask them to do an awful lot, sometimes more than we expect of ourselves, and they do that.
It's almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around middle-class fears, Democrats win the election; when Republicans are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election ...
When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in...
I was the singing voice of a cartoon character. I did dog food commercials. I did a lot of commercials, actually, and helped pay my rent and my classes. Then I'd get one good line or two good scenes. I was building my career and building my own exper...
