"My knowledge of neuroscientific details—knowing which parts of the brain do what—has no effect on my life outside the lab. But my immersion in these details has forced me to appreciate in a deep way the fact that we humans are physical beings all the way down. To be a physical object is to be a collection of parts rather than a unified entity with one point of view and one will. (Like Whitman said, we contain multitudes.) Knowing this helps me tolerate the contradictions in myself and others: Am I happy? Did she do that intentionally? Can people change? These questions never have single answers because we're not single things."

-- Joshua Greene, in "Brain Lessons", Slate

Chicago, U.S.A.

"His question was pragmatic, I’m sure, but in my fugue state it sounded existential. Why do people travel? What are tourists, and what do they — we — hope to take home? Pleasure in seeing something new, of course, but also pride in being among the privileged few to see it, and the self-assurance (however delusional) that our presence has not yet altered the very thing we’ve come to experience. How long can that spell go unbroken? Already, Paul Scholte told me, Socotra’s few tourists have one consistent complaint: they see too many tourists.

"Even more than the flora and fauna, it seemed to me, the most fragile aspect of Socotra is its way of life. Here are a people whose own idea of travel mostly entails the pursuit of goats — a people, in effect, whose ancestors had ended their travels here centuries ago, then ventured no farther. The most endangered way of life nowadays is the one that goes, if not nowhere, then somewhere very slowly, and a traveler must go to the ends of the earth to see it."

-- Alan Burdick, "The Wonder Land of Socotra, Yemen", The New York Times

"[T]he killings at Virginia Tech happen at a moment when we are renegotiating what you might call the Morality Line, the spot where background forces stop and individual choice -- and individual responsibility -- begins. The killings happen at a moment when the people who explain behavior by talking about biology, chemistry and social science are assertive and on the march, while the people who explain behavior by talking about individual character are confused and losing ground.

"And it's true. We're never going back. We're not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle. It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons with better sermons.

"But it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists' insights without allowing them to become monopolists. It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center...

"There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It's just that these selves can't be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are."

-- David Brooks, "The Morality Line", The New York Times

Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, Cambodia

"The Portraits of Grief operated according to their own quickly developed set of tropes, substituting, in most cases, treacle for essence. Day after day, a dozen personalities were obliterated with the Grief team's pastels. To read the Portraits, one would believe that work counted for next to nothing, that every hard-charging bond trader and daredevil fireman preferred--and managed--to spend more time with his family than at the office. "'He always returned to family. That was his No. 1 interest.' ..... He often said he would rather be with his family than anybody else.' .... He spent all of his free time on his wife." The refrain is so endless, a reader can only conclude that the "kinder, gentler nation" once called for by the first President Bush has actually been here all along. It's the same with baseball; one would think from the widespread, intense fandom invoked by the Portraits that the national pastime is in the same tip-top shape as the American family.

"In the days after September 11, I realized that I loved New York City enough to die, or kill, for it. But I do not recognize the city I have lived in or next to, almost all my life, on the Portraits of Grief page. The Times has repopulated Ground Zero with the citizens of Pleasantville, and the "newspaper of record" has been patting itself on the back for constructing the world's largest sympathy card.

"The thousands of people who worked in the Twin Towers toted with them, every day, along with their share of blessings, their share of bad marriages, maxed-out credit cards, and Type-A heartbreak. They were people, not the smile-button cyborgs of the Times, where anyone depressed over his weight became a "gentle giant" and every binge drinker was the life of the party. A surprising number of the dead have been infantilized, with much of the Times's two-hundred-word allotment going to Disney World trips or toy animals: "Mrs. Ehrlich had a soft spot for useless frog paraphernalia. 'As long as the frog wasn't too cartoonlike,' her husband said."

"As the Portraits accumulated over weeks and months, I began performing mental translations, from a sugary base 8 to a real-life base 10. The fifty-four-year-old vegetarian office temp, a bachelor with "strong opinions" who preferred "short-term jobs," was, I would bet, an absolutely impossible man; but I would prefer to have known him rather than the bland reincarnation forced to share a page with other murdered souls under headings like "The Joys of Fatherhood" and "Perpetual Motion." These titles, set in larger type than the victims' names, are relentlessly sentimental and soporific: "Prankster With a Heart," "Modest Winner," "Instiller of Love," "Faithful to Family," "Touching Everyone," "Many Best Friends," "Mr. Generosity." At a certain point I wanted to parody them, but the editors had pretty much done that job themselves: "Multilingual and Multinice."

-- Thomas Mallon, "The Mourning Paper", American Scholar

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it."

-- H.L. Mencken

"And it occurred to me that while we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around. Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere.

"Scarcely a month goes by when Time or Newsweek doesn't have a cover article on how our genes shape everything from our exercise habits to our moods. Science sections are filled with articles on how brain structure influences things like lust and learning. Neuroscientists debate the existence of God on the best-seller lists, while evolutionary theory reshapes psychology, dieting and literary criticism. Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior.

"Creationists reject the whole business, but they're like the Greeks who still worshiped Athena while Plato and Aristotle practiced philosophy. The people who set the cultural tone today have coalesced around a shared understanding of humanity and its history that would have astonished people in earlier epochs...

"Looking at contemporary America from here in Jerusalem and from the ancient past, it's clear we're not a postmodern society anymore. We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history. We have a central cosmology to embrace, argue with or unconsciously submit to."

-- David Brooks, "The Age of Darwin", The New York Times

"Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with our intuitions. Because it is always possible, after the fact, to come up with a story about why things worked out the way they did... our belief in determinism is rarely shaken, no matter how often we are surprised. But just because we now know that something happened doesn’t imply that we could have known it was going to happen at the time, even in principle, because at the time, it wasn’t necessarily going to happen at all."

-- Duncan J. Watts, "Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?", The New York Times Magazine

Hong Kong

"All cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the individual life... Culture means that which is supernatural; all culture has the basic mandate to transcend the physical, to permanently transcend it. All human ideologies, then, are affairs that deal directly with the sacredness of the individual or the group life, whether it seems that way or not, whether they admit it or not, whether the person knows it himself or not."

-- Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil

"That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech. Free speech is enhanced by civility."

-- Tim O'Reilly, in "A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs", The New York Times

"One hope I have is that someone will put a HiDef camera into orbit, giving a full-frame view of the Earth spinning below, and this will be made available to everyone on HiDef cable channel 427 or whatever. Then, when plasma screens – or liquid crystal, or digital wallpaper – get large enough, this image can then occupy the entire wall of a room in your house. You’ll be able to go into that room and do other things – read a book, or listen to music, and occasionally look up – and one entire wall of the room is the Earth as it actually is at the very moment that you’re looking at it. It would be as if your room were in orbit.

"You’d begin to see Earthly events in context – a volcanic eruption in Peru, or the pollution coming out of New York harbor, or the hurricane threatening New Orleans, floods in Bangladesh – and it will begin to change our awareness of our relationship to the Earth in a profound way, the way the mirror changed our relationship to ourselves, and deepened our sense of identity as individuals. Given the technology that we have today, I’m interested that it hasn’t already happened yet. Given the state of the world at the moment, I hope it happens soon."

-- Walter Murch, in "The Heliocentric Pantheon", BLDGBLOG

-- Beijing, China