How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that the...
Georgia O’Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, from the faraway nearby. It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emo...
Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situati...
David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species d...
Ci, których przeraża równość małżeńska, są, na co wskazuje wiele znaków, tak samo przerażeni wizją równości w parach heteroseksualnych jak równością par tej samej płci.
Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the...
A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with yes but. Naysaying becomes a habit.
What’s meant by reproductive rights, of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn’t I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?
Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty...
What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves- that...
Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?
Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to do...
Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving.
Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure tha...
People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.
In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be tol...
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Som...
The thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbandi...
When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in th...
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking...