Why wouldn’t I eat a dog I’d never met? Or more to the point, what justification might I have for sparing dogs but eating other animals?
You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter, I told her, and she said, Then I would never utter another word again. You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do. Then I wou...
Wir können uns nicht mit Unwissenheit herausreden, nur mit Gleichgültigkeit.
Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to...
Why I'm Not Where You Are
We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive.
We spent our lives making livings.
We are traumatized people. And nothing else has trauma’s power to deform the mind and heart.
Use humor as aggressively as chemo. Laugh until your hair falls out. There is nothing that can’t be played for a laugh.
Touch had always saved them in the past. No matter the anger or hurt, no matter the depth of the aloneness, a touch, even a light and passing touch, reminded them of their long togetherness. A palm on...
They lay in silence, thinking their own thoughts, each trying to know the other's. They were becoming strangers on top of each other.
There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.
The morning Julia found the phone, my parents were over for brunch. Everything was falling apart around Benjy, although I'll never know what he knew at the time, and neither will he. The adults were t...
The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.
The inside of life became far smaller than the outside, creating a cavity, an emptiness.
The distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I d...
Sure, you could say that people should just eat less meat, but I’ve got news for you: people don’t want to eat less meat. You can be like PETA and pretend that the world is going to wake up tomorrow a...
Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his childre...
Stories about food are stories about us-our history and our values.
So She had to satisfy herself with the idea of love-loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she...