“Who can possibly save all the people of the world? Tengo thought. You could bring all the gods of the world into one place, and still they couldn’t abolish nuclear weapons or eradicate terrorism. They couldn’t end the drought in Africa or bring John Lennon back to life. Far from it––the gods would just break […]
“‘They can forget about it,’ Ayumi said. ‘I never can.’ ‘Of course not,’ Aomame said. ‘It’s like some historic massacre.’ ‘Massacre?’ ‘The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They […]
Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings is like the first computer my family ever owned: It took a long time to boot up, but did some pretty nifty stuff once it got going. This massive fantasy novel is the first in a series of ten planned installments, only two of which have been published. Committing […]
“The more clearly I attend to things, the more clearly they vanish into me. The Cosmos is all dragon, all generative transformation driven by a restless hunger, and perception shares this dragon-nature, as does any other dimension of this being I am: thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, they all keep relentlessly appearing and evolving and disappearing […]
Wendell Berry is an author I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. As a staunch defender of the environment and nonindustrial agriculture, Berry challenged my parents’ generation to think twice about the price of American modernity. This collection of essays from the 1970s and 80s does just that, and in much richer […]
Lately I’ve been wondering who’s going to take up Edward O. Wilson’s mantle after he dies. For decades, Wilson has penned accessible, intelligent books that help nonspecialists understand what he calls the “Evolutionary Epic”––the grand narrative of terrestrial life. “People need a sacred narrative,” Wilson wrote in 1998. “Homo sapiens is far more than a […]
“Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only […]
“Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and […]
“After 1908, and especially after 1945, capitalist greed was somewhat reined in, not least due to the fear of Communism. Yet inequities are still rampant. The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and Indonesian labourers return home after a […]
“Why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.” ––Sapiens: A […]