He sees our lineal success as a fortunate fluke: Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishing...
Hanged. ‘It was disclosed that a young white official had been found hanged to death in his cell …’ (The New York Times). ‘Hanged to death’ is redundant. So too, for that matter, are ‘starved to death...
Galaxies of the universe are racing away from us, but that they are doing so at a rate that is accelerating.
Fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Disinterested, uninterested. ‘Gerulaitis, after appearing almost disinterested in the first set, took a 5–1 lead in the second’ (The New York Times). A participant in a tennis match might appear unint...
Dilemma. ‘The chief dilemma facing Mr Greenspan is whether or not to raise interest rates’ (Sunday Times). Dilemma does not mean just any difficulty or predicament. Strictly speaking, it applies only...
Can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but if you are not in a hurry it is marvellously efficient. Perhaps
Began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English—a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscu...
Am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas. I
Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell’s influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into...
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,
Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They mak...
Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived,...
Where the British will say howjado for how do you do, an American will say jeetjet for have you taken sustenance recently? and lesskweet for in that case, let us retire to a convivial place for a spot...
When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably oppo...
When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake.
What made this particularly interesting is that John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director – someone whose burning ambition from the age of elev...
Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian, she explained. An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now—that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and...
Until almost the 20th century, Central Park was home to a shepherd and a flock of 200 sheep.
To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All...