Growing up, I felt wretchedly sorry for you. Widowed young, with an eight-month-old baby and no work you loved. Years as a secretary, flattering bosses and cleaning up their messes for chump change. But you left at five on the dot and never looked back, never brought work home except to tell funny stories, and then we played and talked.
The new divide will not be between the conservative and the sex-crazed, but between those of us who are alarmed by our own capacity for jealousy and those who either deal calmly with theirs, bury it, feel none, or lie.
Wife-carrying leaves me with mixed emotions. It sounds prehistoric, conjuring images of flickering firelight and women slung over one shoulder, screaming. But carrying one’s new wife over a threshold? Something primal, locked deep inside me, still thrills to those images.
Sick to my stomach at the naivete that kept me besotted with horse-drawn carriages and blind to the risks of anachronism, I look up the Animal Welfare Act and see to my relief that it protects horses. Then I realize I am looking at the Animal Welfare Act in the UK.
A review of multiple scientific studies showed that individuals with ASD consistently struggled harder with problematic internet use and showed more symptoms of internet addiction—depression, inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, opposition, and escapism. Another review found children and adults with ASD to be more vulnerable to the problematic use of video games.
Done right, bonsai offer a serene beauty—to the beholder. Inside the plant, a genetic code is crashing, and a vital impulse—to grow!—still bubbles. It will die only when the plant dies. Until then, this life force must be constantly constrained. The gardener’s fight may be quiet, dignified, and artistic, but it is relentless.
When Christian art depicts demons, they are being cast out or redeemed. The images at Sauherad are purely demonic, an intertwined decadence with no white space. A detail shot looks like an eerie Seek and Find game, filled with demons, clerics, and bishops; goats, lambs, owls, and insect claws; princesses, tormented men, and masked figures. Nobody was there to counter them, banish them, or save them; they writhed on the wall unchecked.
We have been persuaded that ugly is more efficient. And why? Because it is cheaper. In this raw and hungry young country, we allowed our technology to outstrip aesthetics. Integrating the two would cost more, require tedious effort, take valuable time—and why would capitalists bother?
Our forbears mistrusted slime. Back in the ninth century, a Chinese scholar named one specimen “demon droppings.” European folklore presents slime mold as witches’ work. Today, we seem to be redeeming the stuff.
Places we thought weak, isolated, cut off, backwater, and undeveloped have developed something very different: an understanding of interdependence. And that could reshape how we understand the world, how we live in the world, and how we make policy.
Now that I have shed the self-consciousness of childhood’s fierce inner life and realized I am not the only one who cherishes books and I do not have to protect them single-handedly against bubblegum and mocking boys . . . my heart has softened toward the bookmobile.
Having read stories of heroes and martyrs when we were kids, we take it on faith that people should be willing to die for their beliefs. That, or we dismiss suicidal terrorists as deluded, brainwashed. But have we looked inside the brains of extremists to see what might have been happening when they made their noble or mad choices?