Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past.

The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights.

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.

Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them.