So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad.—Ecclesiastes, 8:15
“I feel like I’ve been broken up with,” I announced. “By my life.”
The problem was that neither Obama nor Occupy was able to give the idea of fraternity any real substance. For Obama, it seemed to imply campaign contributions; for Occupy, endless discussions.
I’ve had a feeling for several years now—the best way I can describe it is as a vague sense of cultural weightlessness, the impression that while there’s an overwhelming amount of high-quality art out there to enjoy, there’s also something terribly insubstantial about it, taken in sum.
It turns out that almost all of us are not eating food fit for humans.
When, in thinking about the ways in which humans and animals are natural creatures, we wax philosophical, we frequently assume that the natural world is ethically neutral.
Where is the moral line between humans’ studied tampering with animals, and all of the other ways species change each other?
Is there a way to bring eating into the field of ethics—to take not only the nomad and the horse as a model of moral relation, but also the eater and the eaten?
As a child, I rooted for the Three Little Pigs as well as for Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, and I delighted in the company of Piglet. I also ate ham sandwiches for lunch.
To say that a sentient being—any sentient being—is not harmed by death is most peculiar.
Many people find nothing odd about the sentence, “I live alone with a cat.”
11. Sometimes crime scene pictures can resemble nature photography, but without the presence of nature. Very often the scene is as near to a blank canvas as is possible without fading entirely into nothingness.
If the Rootabaga Stories are exercises in nation-building, they also tear the nation apart.
Beneath its layers of vintage décor and television cliché, Mad Men is a story about history, and possibly the closest thing we have in the culture to a historical epic.
While watching a sunset from Pipe Dream, I talk to one guy who nonchalantly calls himself “very accustomed” to LSD. He tells me, “There’s Burner art you’ll never understand if you don’t take acid.
