They were free to be what they wanted to be, and what they wanted to be was nothing.

A monarch butterfly has top brand recognition, an excellent recall quotient, and highly favorable demographics. Associate your candidate with famous lepidoptera, and use these filmed spots early and often.

Being Jewish means loving something that’s gone. Your parents, your grandparents, the place they came from. Jerusalem itself. Creation.

The back door beckons to a prodigal son.

If Jack Kerouac had set out to find a real bookstore in the suburbs, he would still be on the road, Phileas Fogg would still be in the air, the Ancient Mariner wouldn't have had time to tell anyone his story.

Thinking back, I can almost feel the air in the commons that day, the things eddying around us. We were breathing in violence and desperation and other people’s hallucinations, but it was all invisible to us then. Like the fluoride in the water or the radiation from Brookhaven, the DDT and the valium and the Strontium 90. All the heavy atoms and alkaloid molecules that shape us and then break us apart.