Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.

We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.

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.

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.

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

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.