But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.

Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.

I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

By all measures men are the more violent gender.