Is there really anyone, besides Rudy Giuliani, who prefers the new Times Square?

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

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. 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? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

Abraham responds "Here I am" when God asks him to sacrifice his son, and he answers "Here I am" when his son asks him about what is happening. It's a paradoxical moment. He can't be fully present for his God or his son.

We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?