The value of money is a scam perpetuated by those who have it over those who don't.
The sunset you see is always better than the one you don't. More stars are always better than less.
The dogs came racing up the stairs. They danced at Rima's feet, frantic with the need to communicate something to her. Little Timmy's down the well! Feed us ice cream and potato chips! Sometimes there...
Over the years I've come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we've done and more to do with who they are.
Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. I'd come to see the heavens, our father always said. But the stars were in her eyes, a line that used to plea...
One morning I was bicycling to class when a large flock of Canada geese passed overhead. I couldn't see them, or much of anything else, but I heard the jazzy honking.
Once, he’d dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world.
My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face.
My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip.
My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep.
I’d no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential—I was torn between the two.
In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentame...
I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.
I read a postelection blog post by the great Ursula K. Le Guin that said that we should stop using the metaphors of war. We should not think in terms of enemies and battles, because such thoughts, in...
Baby, high school's over. High school's never over..
When you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behavior, and the rule was later modified to one in three.
What chimps don’t seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don’t have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality. And really, who lac...
There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their...
Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our ow...
It was long past time to change the subject. The boy playing the bagpipes is really good, Prudie said.If only she’d said it in French! Trey made a delighted noise. Nessa Trussler. A girl. Or something...