The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

We can be skeptical, suitably skeptical, and we can trust news outlets, some more than others.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

Most of what we know we don't really know first hand. I've never seen a cancer cell. But I trust this community of experts who have, so I believe that cancer exists. But we trust these experts, and we trust that the experts have a system of checks and balances and self-correction. And we have to insist that experts have certain certifications. They're not perfect. Every once in awhile there's an engine falls off the wing of a plane, or a tax audit happens and you find out your expert made a mistake. But it's a pretty good system. It's the best system we've got.