“Helen Duncan is my favorite. Huge, chain-smoking woman who used to swoon and occasionally pee herself in the frenzy of spirit possession. Helen had the scientists stumped. She’d produce ectoplasm … even though the researchers had frisked her and done a cavity search prior to her entering the séance chamber. Turned out she was a talented regurgitator.”

This article is filed under Death, Interviews, Religion, Sociology.

“I found out, greatly to my surprise, that almost all of the conventional wisdom that I had read and heard about Ronald Reagan was not true at all. Beginning with the fact that he was always talked of as being passive. The man ran for president three times. Won on his third try. And in 1976 he committed the most aggressive act that an American politician can make, and that is that he ran against a sitting president of his own party. He ran against Gerald Ford and damn near beat him.”

This article is filed under History, Interviews, Politics.

“But water also defines quite well our problems in moving from a world of apparently plentiful resources – a world in which if we screw up we can move on – to a world of finite resources, where we have to manage carefully to get by. We still often see water as an essentially free and unlimited resource. But it isn’t. The public policy response to water shortages is still to build a new dam or sink a new well, with little regard for the thought that there may be no more water in the river to be captured, or underground to be pumped. Apart from the air we breathe, water is the most basic, most urgent, need that we all have. We can survive for a while without food, but not without water. We can survive forever without oil – but not without water. Water has no substitute.”

This article is filed under Environment, Interviews.

“…This is clearly boosting English learning at the moment, but there are already signs that something similar will soon begin to reinforce Chinese too…If English-speakers cease to lead technically and economically, they will soon be caught up with militarily, and indeed culturally and linguistically.”

This article is filed under Interviews, Linguistics.

“Part of the richness of the home culture I come from and what makes it fascinating to work in Iran as a journalist is that I wasn’t an observer. I am culturally of Iran. At the end of the day I’m not going back to a hotel room. I’m going to my aunt’s house or best friend’s house. I’m waking up in the morning to my aunt cooking pancakes.”

This article is filed under History, Interviews, Iran, Politics.

“I thought I should live closer, but I didn’t want to be on the same piece of land as my mother…She was a hard person to get on with, and not a very good mother. In all our lives with her, my brother and I never got a hug or a kiss. She was that kind of mother, and my father was anywhere but at home. At the same time we were raised with a sense of duty, and duty to me is as important as love, if not more important. My book, An Indecent Obsession was about duty.”

This article is filed under Australia, Interviews, Writers.

“All around us we see signs of this confusion. Americans are often called a “materialistic” people and we certainly are surrounded by material possessions and revel in them. But at the same time, the “real world” of physical location seems to be evaporating before our eyes.”

This article is filed under Architecture, Business, Economics, Education, Interviews.

“In a brief biography, a writer needs to set himself a limited question. I chose this one: given Freud’s shortcomings as a scientist, many of them evident in his day, how did he achieve his enormous cultural impact?”

This article is filed under Biography, Interviews, Psychology.

“I was in Baghdad as a volunteer surgeon, but operating was difficult. The city’s hospitals had treated many wounded during the bombing, depleting emergency stores. Following the arrival of the Americans, much of the remainder had been looted, the pillage continuing even as staff tried to deal with arriving casualties. Operating rooms resembled charnel-houses, with discarded surgeons’ gloves, crusted dressings and bloody clothes caked underfoot.”

This article is filed under Africa, History, Interviews, Medicine, Politics.

“Narcissism? Culture in decline? It’s the whole world. Venice was narcissistic, full of iconic buildings, and declined for 500 years, but was still the most pleasant city to live in for much of this time.”

This article is filed under Architecture, Interviews.