“America needs more than a revival of obligation within the family. As business writer Bob Kuttner has commented, it ‘desperately needs an economy based upon notions of mutual obligation and reciprocity.’ People should be able to expect ‘that our home, our church, our kid’s school, our bank, and the place where we work will stay […]
“‘Who’s this?’ ‘Sokolov,’ said the Russian into the phone. ‘We met earlier when I killed half your men. Ten minutes ago I killed the other half. Now there is just you, motherfucker. A fucking piece of shit who uses phone to send better men to die. Then runs away to airport.’ Olivia, watching interestedly from […]
“The concierge gave him another smile and slid the paper across the counter to him. Sokolov accepted it with profuse thanks, walked out the door, climbed into a taxi, and took it to another Western business hotel half a mile up the road. There, he availed himself of a free computer in the lobby, where […]
“Sokolov watched the slow dissolution of the taxi into the crowd with professional admiration. He was a highly trained and experienced warrior, operating completely on his own, free to hide in this building for a while or emerge at a time of his choosing. Even so, he had rated his chances of escaping from this […]
These “dirt” journals are a place for me to celebrate successes and keep a record of how I learn new skills that are different from the kinds of academic skills I’ve cultivated in the past. Part of this process includes admitting defeat. And while my winter garden hasn’t been a total failure, it definitely has […]
“As easy and as tempting as it was to have some fun at the expense of D-squared and his band of medievalists, Richard had to admit that several of them were as serious and dedicated and competent as anyone he’d ever worked with in twenty-first-century settings; and in some very enjoyable conversations shared over mead […]
“No one could look at Peter, who had become a nearly unbearable sight on grounds of posture alone: shoulders drawn together, body trembling, back of neck brilliant red. Sokolov was favorably impressed by the fact that he had not yet shit his pants. Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, […]
“The brain, as far as Richard could determine from haphazard skimming of whatever came up on Google, was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and […]
“The natural thing for Zula to be asking herself at this moment was What did I ever see in this guy? Other than his physical beauty, which was pretty obvious. Those occasional left-handed insights, like the arches. Another thing: he worked very hard and knew how to do a lot of things, which had put […]
“Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge […]