There is also a noblesse oblige quality to all of this insistence on empathy as if our highest obligation as cultivated people were to think well of others despite all evidence to the contrary. One of the goals of our formal education, however — and of our reading — should be that we learn to discriminate, not on invidious bases, but on the quality of other people’s actions rather than their status. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is a joyously hateful book — in the sense that all good satire is motivated by some original antipathy — but it also serves to illustrate that vanity and folly are often found in high places, even in university departments of English.
My tween will never know the sound of me calling her name from another room after the phone rings. She'll never sit on our kitchen floor, refrigerator humming in the background, twisting a cord around her finger while talking to her best friend. I'll get it, He's not here right now, and It's for you are all phrases that are on their way out of the modern domestic vernacular. According to the federal government, the majority of American homes now use cellphones exclusively. “We don't even have a landline anymore,” people began to say proudly as the new millennium progressed. But this came with a quieter, secondary loss—the loss of the shared social space of the family landline.
There are four forces that are canon in our universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But scientists are searching for evidence of a new, unknown force that could explain some of the wildest mysteries facing humanity.
The effects of the four known forces on matter, from the tiny realm of atoms all the way up to the colossal scale of galaxies, are well documented and mostly understood. But when you consider that about 95 percent of our universe’s mass is made up of shadowy unexplained stuff known as dark matter and dark energy, it’s no wonder that scientists have long suspected that those four forces do not represent the entire blueprint of the cosmos.
I’m no longer writing in secret. I’m talking to them about my ideas, even picking their brains for their experiences in Asia. I’m no longer dreaming alone.
Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. Monochrome—like the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. What I’m trying to do here.
What Time Is It? examines the different ways we may think about what is on a chronometer: personal time, clock time, the way time bends and stretches and loop-de-loops for each of us in a unique way as we walk through the world, and how we are always walking in the shadow of our own death, whether or not we know it. Time in one place for one person is not necessarily the same as time for another, even if both may be measured by the same clock—and, of course, as Einstein famously observed, time is relative: clocks tick slightly differently, depending on how fast they are moving in space.