Let's admit that just now our world could use a little sprucing up. I often think of the joke that dramatist Samuel Beckett has one of his characters tell about the world.
A man hires a tailor to make...
I suspect that each of us carries some best thing around inside, some thing that we want to develop not for glory or riches but because it would mean ripening to fruit the finest thing that we feel capable...
Isn't there is a certain enchantment that sometimes comes over us when we pass a lovely house? The sunny windows, the neat lawn, those tidy bricks and that happy bench by the front door: we drink them...
I started playing squash in grad school because my dissertation director told me to take up a sport. Squash is a racquet sport of precision, strategy and stamina played by two people on an enclosed court....
The philosopher Ernst Bloch writes that some false propositions "are not totally finished with regard to the truth." This strange formulation insists that factually untrue philosophical propositions...
Sometimes I think about other jobs I could be happy doing. I think I'd like a job helping needy people or non-human animals, or one in which I do something more productive with my hands than type. But...
My astronomy professor once turned our classroom lights off and slowly moved a laser pointer (a technological novelty in those horse-drawn carriage days) from left to right across the dark wall. The red...
