GENES: FATE AND CHOICE
Siddhartha Mukherjee:
Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments – otherwise, there would be no conserved form.
CYCLING: INSIDE OR OUTSIDE?
I’ve spent many hours and miles on bicycles over the course of my life. I commuted to work by bicycle for most of my career, in all sorts of circumstances – some more risky than others.
Read moreSO MANY WORDS, SO LITTLE TIME
I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that I’m not able (or willing?) to read all of the books and essays that I think I want to read.
Read moreTHE VALUE OF CIVILIZATION
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:
… the chief worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place.
LIVING AN ENTIRELY PRIVATE LIFE IS A DEPRIVATION
Hannah Arendt:
To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself.
OF A CERTAIN AGE …
Ian McEwan:
In your mid-thirties you could begin to ask what kind of person you were. The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over.