This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.

What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.

Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.

Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.

Every thing, even the so-called timesaving device and energy-efficient machine, comes these days with an elaborate set of instructions for its care and feeding. Buying a machine has become more and more like buying a pet. ... We are time-crunched. Not just by the number of things we have to do, but the number of things we have. In the late twentieth century, things have become our new dependents.

The great myth of our work-intense era is 'quality time.' We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.

In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?