People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.

I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.