Obviously this is the world descending into worse and worse standards of targeting civilians both in state violence in Iraq, Gaza and so on and the terrorist retaliation.
We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.
In the descent from a world of factual discourse into a world of emotions and alternative realities, the first step you take, whether you're the Russian media, whether you're Breitbart, is that you manufacture lots of stuff that isn't true. The second step is that you claim that everyone is like this.
Whether we're conscious of it or not, our work and personal lives are made up of daily rituals, including when we eat our meals, how we shower or groom, or how we approach our daily descent into the digital world of email communication.
In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
When I was in school, you never saw anyone who looked like us that was on TV. And that was really weird for me because there's so many people of South Asian descent in America - in the world.
A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else.
Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.
Victoria was just as much in love with me as I was with her. We could not bear to be apart for a single second. We were like two lovers shipwrecked on a desert island. There was no world outside our love.
Somebody once told me I treated my smart phone like Wilson, the volleyball Tom Hanks turns into a friend when he's stranded on a desert island in that movie 'Castaway.' It's an apt comparison: parenting a toddler occasionally feels like being marooned, and your phone is your only connection to the rest of the world.
There are people who travel because they want to push themselves to physical limits, people who walk across deserts or cycle across the Antarctic - like Ranulph Fiennes, who just does it because it's there. And then there are people like me, who are just genuinely curious about the world.
The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that equals the Yangtze River, that equals the Nile. We have the greatest cities in the world - among the greatest cities in the world.
For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.
I certainly don't think I'm deserving of taking up space forever as a human. There's a whole generation of people yet to be born that are going to be so much more evolved than I am. I don't want to take up space. They're going to be better equipped to make the world a better place than I am.
When I was younger, I wish I would have been told more often that I was right and nothing was wrong with me, that I was deserving of everything this world has to offer, and that my visions for my future were worthy of pursuit.
Incidentally, the usual designation of the magnitude scale to my name does less than justice to the great part that Dr. Gutenberg played in extending the scale to apply to earthquakes in all parts of the world.
I am old enough to think the word 'journalist' is not all that noble a designation. Journalist - that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases - was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer - once the ambition of every journalist - was to be the greater truth teller.
I'm not sure what I think about current fashion, though. A few years ago, I would have said it's really, really bad and you hardly ever see anybody looking good. There must be some very good designers in the world.
The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.
Everybody is struggling for the good things of the world, and all the arguments to prove that they are not desirable are worse than wasted.
