Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers,...
It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.
If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those wh...
I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again.
Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, wh...
For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.
De Certeau’s metaphor suggests a frightening possibility: that if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, on...
Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike bec...
Books are solitudes in which we meet.
And the conservatives have not mounted what seems to be their real objection: that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles. I know lovely and amazing he...
A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—
Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.
Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row - spouse, offspring, pri...
Other eras and cultures often asked different questions from the ones we ask now: What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life? What’s your contribution to the world or your community?...
One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. No advanced step take by women has been so bitterly conteste...
Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work...
More than any other city, [Paris] has entered the paintings and the novels of those under its sway, so that representation and reality reflect each other like a pair of facing mirrors, and walking Par...
It wasn't surprising and it wasn't quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine's corpse was and urged...
It described the double bind of women in that moment: they were getting congratulations for being fully liberated and empowered while being punished by a host of articles, reports, and books telling t...