The opposite of ‘Indian giver’ would be something like ‘white man keeper’ (or maybe ‘capitalist’), that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation.

I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less. The literature dealing with this economic sexism has recently turned into a flood.

If you are fortunate enough to share a neighborhood with a leafy elm, a gnarly oak, a soaring redwood, take another look at its silhouette against the sky. That self-similar 4-D explosion of branching branches is a clue to a cosmic riddle or two, and a key concept in fields as unrelated as vascular surgery and software design.

The evolution of language as an instrument of play and amusement probably occurred parallel to (or even preceded) its evolution as a practical tool. There is no question, at any rate, that story-telling is an ancient art, and that like most play it serves a vital — if often unrecognized — function, for the values and underlying principles of any culture have always been most effectively carried from one generation to the next via the medium of its stories, myths and legends.

“Research has to go through a body; it has to be lived in some sense—transformed into some sort of lived experience—in order to become whatever we might call art. . . . A lot of art now just points at things. Merely the transfer of something into a gallery is enough to bracket it as art.”

Text is never neutral but is shaped by the mode of its delivery.