Mark Twain on Sermonizing
“Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.”
Amen to that!
“Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.”
Amen to that!
In another great New Yorker article, Lauren Collins writes about controversy over taxing wealthy people in France, a controversy that has already caused Gerard Depardieu to move to Belgium and/or Russia. At one point in the article, she interviews experts to get their views on whether such taxes are effective in raising revenue. One expert…
Leibniz once described music as an “occult exercise in mathematics performed by a mind unconscious of the fact that it is counting.” As someone currently working through some late Beethoven piano masterpieces, this description makes a lot of sense to me. Now if I can only find enough practice time to make my performances more…
Back in early February, Brown authored an article on the North Dakota oil boom. It is a great piece of reporting. Also, a fine bit of writing, as captured by this sentence: In a way, of course, this kind of frontier is as much a state of mind as an actual place, a melancholy mood…
I have been pulling a lot of quotes, recently, from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree. The book is wonderful, although too long. It could have used a more aggressive editor. Nevertheless, it is chock full of great stories and great ideas. Here is a Solomon quote I feel compelled to share, which captures how…
Not long ago, I had the pleasure of reading Fooling Houdini, by Alex Stone. It is a marvelous book, part memoir about how his obsession with magic pulled him away from his career in physics, but also a wonderful explanation of the psychology of how magic works its wonders. Get rid of all those images…
Read the following quote, and try to guess which U.S. president made this statement: “A responsible budget is not our only weapon to control inflation. We must act now to protect all Americans from healthcare costs that are rising $1 million per hour, 24 hours a day, doubling every 5 years. We must take control…