The Life of a Writer in Three Acts
Carson Cistulli: “The Life of a Famous Writer is very similar to the above, except for the addition of a fourth act, in which the deceased author’s work is discovered and then hailed for its original style.”

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
“Too often we compel our children to follow the most obvious paths, happy for them to become robotically focused doctors, scientists, lawyers, and similar “experts” or “technicians,” even as we tend to view the making of lots of money and the acquisition of a McMansion in a gated community as the measure of success and personal fulfillment. What we sometimes forget to foster, alas, is the desire for a life of mental adventure.”

How tickling a child connects parents and kids.
“In the wild, chimpanzee infants will bite their mothers, who respond by tickling; the infants then bite their mothers again, which provokes more tickling; and so on. It’s a social dance: Tickling is the way we and the chimps establish, without words, that we’re in this thing together.”

A Belated Rant Against Literature as Philosophy
“If a fiction writer…really has the philosophical goods, then chances are, you’re going to see it spelled out in actual treatises. If you don’t see this, then you’ve most likely got a philosophical debutante, a dabbler, someone who may be a great observer of human nature but can’t actually concoct a coherent theory or two to express these insights.”

Reporting science: Journalistic deficit disorder | The Economist
“The deflating follow-ups, by contrast, languished in more obscure publications, which hard-pressed hacks and quacks alike are less likely to read.”