When you're a child - and my understanding of it is very basic - but when you're a very young child, the stimuli around you prompt your brain to form synapses. Once they're there, they're there, but if they don't form by a certain age, they're not going to.

Jay Wexler is my kind of writer--a weird one, and a wry one, and one who isnt afraid to act silly in a sort of bait-and-switch that, to the readers surprise, moves him as much as it makes him laugh. Like all the best comedians, Wexler is clearly nursing a heart that the world broke a long time ago. Ed Tuttle is a book that cant decide what it wants to be when it grows up, but as with most cases of arrested development, theres something very serious going on behind all the antics. Plus, there are pictures.

Some people believe that everyone will experience judgment day. But it's my understanding that the Judgment Day or Rapture that I'm going to experience, as a nonbeliever, is not going to be the good part. That's the essential difference between the Singularity and what we're usually told about the fate of our eternal souls.

I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

You could not be more correct. It does matter. All of it.

I tend toward the pessimistic end of the spectrum, and unfortunately there's little in human history to convince me that pessimism is unwarranted.

Everything ends, and Everything matters. Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.