A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.

People hurt each other. That's what people do.

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?

Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

You have to do something bad to do something good.