Hostile
When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed i...
We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespear...
To call human beings ‘stewards’ of this planet is like accepting that Jack the Ripper is the right man to start a Home for the Care and Protection of Fallen Women.
They knew there was something there – possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies – and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none e...
The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day—and, as this volume slimly attests, the...
Rich women, including the queen, made themselves additionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead—all at least mildly toxic,
Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, We all do.
Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.
Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its properties that it is generally benign but at other times swiftly letha...
I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty...
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycl...
I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
What moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time. Of
Obligatory
Fours
Two of the casters contained salt and pepper, but what went into the third caster is unknown. It is generally presumed to have been dried mustard, but that is really because no one can think of anythi...
There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours.
The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.
Several of the houses have been mildly disfigured by the careless addition of electrical wires to their façades (something that other less intellectually distracted nations would put inside) but never...