Fine Distinctions
… about animals and their ways. Those stories had sharp points. Aristotle credits Aesop with defending a corrupt … They no longer bother me. Remove them, and fresh fleas will come.” In other words: Oust the politician, and another will … that last bit never really works: We brave dangers, and we die. We tell our stories, and we pass on. But the stories …
Fine Distinctions
… Of Marsupials and Placentals Why are there no giant tree-climbing, … classification, but now that cladistic approaches are common—using behavior and ecological setting to guide … up next to a real saber-toothed placental cat, and so they died. And as for arboreal kangaroos, forget about it. One …
Fine Distinctions
… each passing year. In 2017, an average of 130 Americans died every day of opioid overdose. A federal report issued … painfully slow economic recovery. Cast the French word that comes into English as despair , and you have hopelessness, … is much like that. He used it to denote an all-encompassing dread, the kind of fear that no fight-or-flight …
Fine Distinctions
… the tsar and his replacement with a nice boy from the Urals. Sometimes movements are evolutionary, taking to the … has proceeded with strides so gigantic that it has passed completely out of the narrow domain of rebellion, and …
Fine Distinctions
… of its happening lessens the closer to impossible it comes: living to one hundred, let’s say, following a life of … you know ain’t true.” Faith turns not only on belief but also on certainty. I hope, as millions of people do, that … that I have faith that I will win the Powerball, I would commit a grammatically permissible but essentially …
Fine Distinctions
… dull? If I put my desk next to a window, will my thoughts become insipid? Where is the dragon sleeping? Practitioners of … a line, a meridian, wrapping neatly around the planet. Also called geodetic north, it is constant to the extent that, for our lifetimes, it points pretty much toward Polaris, our North Star for the …