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[...] I was devoting a lot of energy to the morbid avoidance of colds, because whenever I got a cold I couldn't write or smoke, and whenever I couldn't write or smoke I couldn't feel smart, and feeling smart was pretty much my only defense against the word. [...]

[...] This was in 1979. I was exclusively reading great literature (Kafka, Goethe), and although I could forgive Ekström for not understanding what a serious person I'd become, I had zero interest in opening a book with such a lurid cover. [...]

[...] China in general, in its headlong pursuit of money, with fabulous millionaries and a vast underclass and a dismantled social safety net, and with a central government obsessed with security and skilled at exploiting natonalism to quiet its critics, and with economic and environmental regulati…

My father, despite writing letters filled with life and curiosity, saw nothing wrong with consigning my mother to four decades of cooking and cleaning at home while he was enjoying his agency out in the world of men. It seems to be the rule, in both the small world of marriage and the big world of …

[...] I didn't understand that the worst damage to the country was being done not by the pathogen but by the immune system's massive overresponse to it, because I didn't have a TV. I was mentally comparing Tuesday's death toll with other tallies of violent death--three thousand Americans killed in …