It would be my desert island book, this Love Life for Every Married Couple; marriage being to me the most obvious path to the hardest lesson we've all got to learn […]

Think about all those Boxing Day sales, then sit back and relish in the fact that you have enough and that you don't give a shit.

Every cultural instinct and previous experience tells you that when you travel this far you should find, at the very least, people on camels. There should be unrecognizable lettering on the signs, and swarthy men in robes drinking coffee from thimble-sized cups and puffing on hookahs, and rattletrap buses and potholes in the road and a real possibility of disease on everything you touch—but no, it's not like that at all.

Oh, speaking of science-fictionish, are you aware of the fact that one branch of future studies and future methodologies grew out of the Pentagon?90 Think about those futures. In 1983, Bob Dylan would sing, in “Union Sundown” (Infidels)[…]