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We’ve made science experiments of ourselves and our children.
There’s never been a culture that wasn’t obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food.
I’m interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I’m not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest – and yet it is all these things.
Just about every children’s book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don’t. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line… I don’t mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit.
There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn’t happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.
Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don’t want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it’s also a parent’s worst nightmare: That they won’t need you. It’s like the real tragedy of parenting.
I’m less worried about accomplishment – as younger people always can’t help but be – and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.
I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends’ houses. I like places where there’s stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.