Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.