You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

Between us, you wouldn't believe the hate mail.

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.