Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years.

Here's an idea: let's get over ourselves, buy a cherry pie, and go fall in love with life.

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months.

When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.

A child's mind is its living room; it's is going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.

Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore.