Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the...
Though you tell yourself it’s preposterous, you can’t quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene (it’s just a woods for goodness sake), but really you are jump...
This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly, I knew that I was quite wrong.
They determined, for instance, that a rusting object doesn’t lose weight, as everyone had long assumed, but gains weight – an extraordinary discovery.
They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough – the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off....
The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.
The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water—we sweat and cry sea water, as Margulis and Sagan have put it—but curiously we cannot tolerate th...
The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke36 about a posteriori conclusions – reasoning from known facts back to possible causes. ‘You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,’ he w...
The most notable feature about anecdotes involving toilet practices is that they always—really, always—involve people from one country being appalled by the habits of those from another.
The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Esch...
The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill.
The grouse were almost certainly released a few at a time from cages. For all the sport in it, Walsingham might just as well have fired into the cages and given himself more time for tea.)
The greatest part of the tragedy is that there was actually plenty of food in Ireland itself. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls...
The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: All things are made of atoms.
The friendliness of Australians – all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell – never ceases to amaze or gratify.
The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history’s attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card
The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.
The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.
The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when travelling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentiall...
The body is in constant danger of being depleted by a greedy brain, but cannot afford to let the brain go hungry as that would rapidly lead to death.