The dehydrator blows warm air on your food for hours, sometimes days. It reminds me of the temperature and intensity of dog's breath. So imagine a German shepherd exhaling on your fruit for a weekend.
Journalism is an enemy of rationality. What makes news? The unusual and the spectacular, which by their nature distort reality and pervert our decisions. You read headlines like 15 KILLED IN PLANE CRA...
I know we’re missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they’d look gawky and gangly on TV.
Etruscans sometimes wrote boustrophedon style, in which the direction of writing alternates with each line—right-to-left, then left-to-right. Brilliant! The eye doesn’t waste time trekking back to the...
The whole bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man. God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all....
Remember, sometimes you have to look beyond the weirdness. It's like the temple in ancient Jerusalem. If you went there, you'd see oxen being slaughtered and all sorts of things. But look beyond the w...
Jealousy is a useless, time-wasting emotion that's eating me alive.
I've rarely said the word Lord, unless it's followed by of the Rings.
I'm hungry enough that I started to salivate at the sight of lettuce. I repeat: lettuce.
Year hasn’t been observed since the time of the Temple (The Second Jewish Book of Why, p. 262). The Sabbath year is still observed in some form, but only in Israel (ibid., p. 320). DAY 44 I first lear...
Will try to find the original intent of the biblical rule or teaching and follow that to the letter.
To properly engage in magical thinking, I find you have to think of every possible ghastly scenario. That's the only way you outsmart fate.
This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just lowering the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbat...
The pedometer doesn’t just spur us to move, though it certainly does that. It changes the way we think about movement. What was once a chore becomes a game.
The Bible is so strange, so utterly bizarre, no human brain could have come up with it.
Step back for a minute. Pretend you're from Mars. From a coldly rational point of view, pedestrian helmets aren't a crazy idea.
My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.
As I was passing this man on the street, he looked at me, snarled, and gave me the finger. What was going through his mind? Does he hate shepherds? Or religion? Did he just read Richard Dawkins’s book...
You watch the Appalachian snake handlers on the Discovery Channel, and they look as weird as the guy on Coney Island who hammers six-inch nails into his nostrils, or Nick Nolte after a couple of vodka...
The whole Bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man, says Greenberg. God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relat...