Because history is the soap opera that hurts, the kabuki with real knives.
Bad things don’t just grow on one path, they’re everywhere.
Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad.
And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don’t know we have, glimpses of that larger world—vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of e...
And so sometimes when you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened- or when you look up in the sky and are surprised at the sight of bright Jupiter...
Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I a...
After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outpu...
What has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made i...
And were making themselves into many things they have never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But...
We are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That’s what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we h...
We all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were t...
The space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, a...
The phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite sugges...
The current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines.
The crowds just background tapestries for you to play your life against, lurid backdrops providing a fake sense of drama to help you imagine you’re doing more than you would be if you were in some sle...
Nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for...
Here’s the genuine thoughtfulness and deep consideration for sake of truth and meaningful understanding. There’s the recognition that if there were simple answers, we’d have already implemented simple...
Doesn’t require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed.
You died to teach me that I was wrong -- that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would n...
Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it’s hard to fix! Ha-ha.