Dear Editor, So you think the world doesn’t need talking chimpanzees. Well, have any of your smart-aleck editorial writers bothered to come here to Kibbencook and see our talking chimpanzee? Her name...
Boxer altered his course subtly, as if that was the way he'd already been going, not looking up to acknowledge he had heard, letting his attitude convey the contempt he felt for the scrawny foreman. H...
Behind Hagedorn’s back, Kawakita had nicknamed the administrator Stumpy. Only Margo and a few of Frock’s other graduate students had known the name referred not to Hagedorn’s diminutive size, but to S...
Baba Ghanouj
As we hoped, our kids began to learn Italian. One day Isaac sat down to dinner, looked at the plate of pasta we’d prepared, made a face, and said, Che schifo! a vulgar expression meaning Gross! We wer...
Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can’t tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many...
And what was he like? Did he have three heads? If he did, two must have been successfully removed in infancy.
Alterman had hired a professional ASL interpreter from the Somerville School for the Deaf. Her credentials were impeccable. She was terrific and we had very carefully coached Jennie and rehearsed her...
All the great pillars of my life are crumbling. I must constantly remind myself that I am not the only grieving person in the world. And yet, the loss of Reba is a terrible cross to bear and I do not...
Spaces again. I guess one citation wasn’t enough. Pendergast pulled out the previous ticket. You mean this? That’s right. Pendergast neatly tore it in half and tucked the pieces back into his pocket....
She spent many hours whirling around trying to catch the monarch butterflies that floated among the milkweed and chokecherries. When she caught them, she cupped them in her hands and smelled them, as...
One day she started making this gesture. It wasn’t an ASL sign at all, and I realized with a shock—I’m sorry, but you won’t believe this—that she was crossing herself. I can hardly believe it now when...
Zero-sum games deal with resources that neither increase nor decrease in amount—they only shift from one player to the other. Given your present frame of mind, were you to speak now, I’m afraid you mi...
Zemurray was not a man to be ignored or insulted. He had come to that particular meeting with a weapon of mass destruction: a bagful of proxies from other United Fruit shareholders that gave him major...
Your grandmother sent me to church every day, and it did me no harm. It was in church that I was converted to atheism. Also, it’s a wise hedge. I myself might take it up on my deathbed, just in case.
While in estrus she found being confined intolerable, even though she had always slept in a locked room. We had to listen to her screaming and pounding much of the night, and one night during that fir...
When I walk to the pulpit on a Sunday and see my parishioners seated so properly in their rows, so neatly dressed, so assured and expectant, I am filled with a sense of panic. I have not done what I s...
We live in a nation of ignoramuses. The average American knows nothing about science. A man asked me once if the stars went away when the sun rose, or if they were still there but you just couldn’t se...
Toward the end Jennie and I had quite a bit of trouble. The inconsistent and chaotic atmosphere in the Archibald home was starting to take its toll. Jennie became very disobedient. She picked up a lot...
To one side, a vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, polished to a gem-like brilliance, sat on a flatbed trailer, ready to be taken to its new owner. Constance looked from Pendergast to the Rolls and bac...