"I do a lot of public speaking, often debating public figures on television or other high profile settings, or giving speeches to large audiences," one Fellow, an immigration rights lobbyist, wrote in her query response. "I am constantly, almost involuntarily, honing my skills by debating adversaries or giving…
That evening, at a café near the work site, I had a drink with an iter physicist, who was despondent, fearing that the machine would never work. Why he was staying with the project he couldn’t say. But a few weeks later, after thinking about it, he told me that his mood had lifted. He had come to see his role in both…
A good card magician knows many tricks that depend on luck—they don’t always work, or even often work. There are some effects—they can hardly be called tricks—that might work only once in a thousand times! Here is what you do: You start by telling the audience you are going to perform a trick, and without telling them…
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of…
The fear of meeting the opposition of envy, or the illiberality of ignorance is, no doubt, the frequent cause of preventing many ingenious men from ushering opinions into the world which deviate from common practice. Hence for want of energy, the young idea is shackled with timidity and a useful thought is buried in…
My eye is wet with tears For I see the white stones That are covered with names The stones of my forefathers’ graves. No grass grows upon them For deep in the earth In darkness and silence the organs of life To their primitive atoms return. Through ages the air Has been moist with their blood The ages the seeds of the…
The universe flows, carrying with it milky ways and worlds, Gondwanas and Eurasias, inconsistent visions and clumsy systems. But the good conceptual models, these serena templa of intelligence on which several masters have worked, never disappear entirely. They are the great legacy of the past. They linger under more…