Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us t...
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don’t know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.
Once she gets over the shock of it and settles into a routine, she startslooking around her, watching the other fish-cutting dames, and realizes thatthis is just like life must be for about 99 percent...
On the social front it was a question of Amistics, which was a term that had been coined ages ago by a Moiran anthropologist to talk about the choices that different cultures made as to which technolo...
Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn button so furiously that he might detonate the air bag.
None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts.
No surprises is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The peopl...
Native Americans had tricksters—creatures full of cunning—like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn’t have technology yet, and so they hadn’t coupled the Trickster with Crafts to gener...
Most of their children had reached the age when they were no longer naturally endearing to anyone save their own parents; the size when their energy was more a menace than a wonder; and the level of i...
Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything...
Morse code didn’t leave a paper trail, or an email thread on the screen of your tablet. She would never be able to scroll back and reread the exchange she’d just had with Rufus.
Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backwards and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alt...
Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make themselves cuddly and nonthreatening...
Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society p...
Maybe we should go back and get their guns, Marlon suggested. That’s how it would work in a video game, Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing.
Mammon led them on, Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Go...
Larkin Schoendienst had told Betsy that in DC there were two ways to murder policy without appearing to have committed a crime. One was cobwebbing, in which a person with an idea--usually a young and...
It’s, like, one of them drug dealer boats, Vic says, looking through his magic sight. Five guys on it. Headed our way. He fires another round. Correction. Four guys on it. Boom. Correction, they’re no...
It’s just like the reviews promised—other people’s ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting...
It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.