It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theo...
We’d been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming t...
His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were--one too mild, one too easily tem...
I go back to the union man and say, “Sir, this is a house of God, not a proper place for a union meeting. I have some things to say today that God would not want to hear in His own house. Boys, I want you to get up, every one of you, and go across ...
Hamlet promised himself he’d throw down afterward, but I think perhaps when he said, “From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” the limits of blank verse weakened his resolve somehow. If he’d been free to follow the d...
When William Johnson and slave walked down that long, winding American road toward freedom and justice, they didn't realize they would be speaking out for all those left behind. They learned that it would take hard work to make the words of the Decla...
He parked the car, pressed the button for the roof to fold back, and undid his seat belt. "It's an emergency." Goldilocks giggled. She unfastened her belt and hopped onto her knees. "Yes, I can see" - she glanced down at his crotch - "That we're in d...
It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know...
Ingrid's skin was the smoothest texture, so pale that it was transparent. I could see the blue veins that ran down her arms, and they made her seem fragile somehow. the way Eric Daniels, my first boyfriend, seemed fragile when I laid my head on his c...
When you're asked to stay out of a bar you don't just punch the owner--you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a man gets wise, mash his face. If a woman snubs yo...
I love to see those paragliders weaving softly around Moon Point, their legs floating above you in the air. When they drift in for a landing, their feet touch the ground and they trot forward from the continued motion of the glider, which billows dow...
I fell asleep. But later that night I woke up. There was moonlight coming through the window, and shadows of tree branches fell onto the bed, waving gently in the breeze." "And then you saw the ghost?" James laughed. "Dear chap, the branches WERE the...
She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are...
Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-these...
A goal of this book has been to tear down in some small part these barriers to understanding by attempting to shatter the “divinity of arithmetic,” through showing that even the methods, which we now take most for granted, were not given to us fr...
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe...
Juggling and balancing effectively required that we make clear, legacy-driven choices about what we're trying to keep in the air and how we sequence our movements down the beam. Because the ultimate grade in life is not based on how far and fast we'v...
Then as we passed down this Passage we were knocked against certain Women of the Town, who gave us Eye-language, since there were many Corners and Closets in Bedlam where they would stop and wait for Custom: indeed it was known as a sure Market for L...
But we are not going to talk about that right now, because to talk about it I'll have to think about it, and I've thought it to death over the last year. There are parts of my brain that are still tirelessly thinking about it, about her, an entire re...
I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.' 'That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it?' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the ...
was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis ...