I was taken aback by the headline: “Burton Richter, a Nobel Winner for Plumbing Matters, Dies at 87.” I was amazed that the Prize was awarded for, perhaps, developing a laser guided snake for the commode. Then I thought again.

The TV ad for the drug Repatha told me not to take that medicine if I am allergic to it. How do I know if I am allergic to Repatha if I never take it?

          Was he right? A distinguished academic who had spent most of his career in New Haven had moved to New York. He stated that in New Haven he saw lots of movies because there was little else to do. Now he seldom had time for them, partly because his wife had mapped out an extensive social life for him. He indicated that sometimes it seemed a bit too much, but still he said, she is filled with all this energy, and she knows lots of interesting people. His luncheon companion agreed that his wife knew lots of interesting people, but there was a failing in the people she knew.  The companion continued, “You would think better of the social life if she knew more twenty-eight year olds with cleavage.” The academic laughed and laughed and said, “Twenty-eight with cleavage.  What a great movie title.”

The acknowledgements by the best-selling novelist started: “I would like to express my most sincere thanks to the following:” He gave no explanation for why he could not thank them.

“The Sicilian language is the only one in Europe that has no future tense.” Albert Mobilio, “Introduction” to Leonardo Sciascia, The Wine-Dark Sea.

The server was new. She said that she served at the restaurant a few days a week. She also worked for a service that cleaned rental cottages. The cleaning work had taken a turn for the worse. The cleaners had been allowed to take the food and toiletries left behind by the renters, but no longer. She said that some renters had come early and stocked the place before the cleaners had arrived, and the cleaners did what they had always done and took home what they had found in the pantry and refrigerator. The renters were upset, and the police were called. That got worked out, but now the cleaning service forbade the workers from taking anything out of the rental cottages. This was a blow. The half loaf of rye bread and the leftover deli ham had been important perks for the cleaners.

“I like to think that I’m an honest man, but in the modern world you can’t carry honesty very far without taking a break from time to time.” Walter Mosley, Charcoal Joe.

In addition to recommending the Foxfield Inn, we also highly recommend the nearby Ivy Inn Restaurant for dinner. It was as good a meal as the spouse and I have had in long time—innovative dishes carefully prepared. For me, it is not spring until I get some ramps, so I was especially happy to see them during the menu on our springtime visit. The spouse had shrimp and grits, and the grits were special not just because they were a local product, but also by the addition of two cheeses—I think a mild blue cheese and mascarpone—and the shrimp were perfectly cooked.

The spouse loves her Manhattans, but she is a traditionalist, and I was surprised when she ordered a specialty one at the Ivy Inn. She was wowed. It had the now-trendy one large ice cube, which chilled the drink without over-diluting it. The Manhattan had rye (craft, of course), black walnut bitters, sweet vermouth, and the surprise ingredient, Art in the Ages: Root, something we had never heard of before. Our server told us it was a liquor using ingredients that often find their way into root beer. Because we liked the Manhattan so much, we went looking for Art in the Ages: Root and found that the small Philadelphia distillery that made it no longer does so. An internet search, however, found a few stores in New York City that still had some bottles.

The trip to Virginia had the added bonus of getting me to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, when we got back. A liquor store’s website said that a Greenpoint liquor store had some Art in the Ages: Root. Greenpoint borders the ultimate hipsterish part of Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and I was told that hipsters were spreading into Greenpoint, but the liquor store’s environs were untouched by the new Brooklyn. It was still a Polish neighborhood as it had been for decades or longer. I saw butcher shops with extensive displays of sausages and hams. Bakeries were on every block. Still having delayed the start of my diet, I went into one and heard only Polish until I ordered a delicate pastry stuffed with cream and a bread with a poppy seed filling. The liquor store itself was not the usual Brooklyn liquor store that has an extensive wine selection. Wines here were minimal. Instead a thirty-foot long wall eight-feet high of more liquors than I never knew existed.  Facing these shelves was refrigerated case after refrigerated case of more kinds of vodka than I had ever seen before. The woman running the place looked hard at me as if no one but regulars came in. I asked for Art in the Ages: Root. She said that she had never heard of it and was sure that they did not have it. I told her that it was on the store’s website. She went to the computer and said in a surprised tone that they did stock what I wanted. She dragged a ladder over and ascended to the highest shelf and hand me a bottle and said they had two more. I told her I would take all three giving me what I assume will be a lifetime supply for the spouse since little of the drink is used in the Manhattans.

The Ivy Inn, besides teaching us a new way to make a Manhattan, also had a good wine list that offered a fair number of local wines. I am not sure that I had ever before had a Virginia wine, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted one–I had doubts that they made even barely palatable wines in Virginia (a lesson extrapolated from once drinking a Pennsylvania wine), but some Virginia stuff could be had by the glass, so I reasoned, what the hell. The server said that while Virginia made some good reds, the region was more known for whites. The spouse and I each ordered a glass. Mine was a passable chardonnay, but the spouse loved hers listed as “Chardonnay and Viognier.” We looked for it unsuccessfully afterwards at our various stops, but as we drove around outside Charlottesville, we now noticed how many wineries the area had. We even saw a sign for a winery that said “Trump.” We did not even slow down.

We recently stayed at a gracious Bed and Breakfast, the Foxfield Inn, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Our room and bath were beautifully furnished with a comfortable bed and luxurious linens with even a rubber duckie available for the spa tub.  No TV in the room. It was good to get away from my usual diet of too much CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and ESPN.

Although there were five guestrooms, we were the only guests the first night with two other couples the next night. (We were there midweek in less-than-high season.) There was a pantry for the guests, with coffee, tea, water, sodas, and very good cookies—I postponed the start of what I said to myself would soon be a diet.

The Foxfield Inn had two public rooms and, of course, a breakfast room. And that breakfast was something. Three courses of innovative dishes featuring local ingredients. I loved that bacon.

On that first day and morning, without other guests, there were opportunities to chat with our hosts, Dan and Kathryn, and I learned why the breakfast was so good. Kathryn had a degree in food science and spent the bulk of her career in the food service industry developing products for the likes of Cadbury. The spouse asked for a recipe for one of the dishes we were served, but Kathryn said that it was a variation, with seasonal ingredients, on something she had made many times without a recipe. Dan proudly stated that she was working on a cookbook. Bring on that book, Kathryn!

Dan was a chemical engineer and entered what he no doubt expected would be his lifelong career at Kodak. He worked on specialty films used for DNA fingerprinting. I don’t know how long this valuable work lasted, but soon this important product was in the bin with buggy whips as digital camera technology emerged.  Kathryn soon said to him, “Let’s do something different.” I have heard many people over the years propose something similar, but few ever acted on it. Forty years ago, I even heard a number of couples say—in those years before the second Bob Newhart Show—that they planned to open a New England bed and breakfast. Dan and Kathryn fell into the small numbers that actually followed through. They started looking for a bed and breakfast, and after an extensive search, they bought the Foxfield Inn nine years ago. The spouse and I are glad they did. We highly recommend it.

We shared a breakfast table on our second morning at the Foxfield Inn bed and breakfast with a couple driving from their Florida home in The Villages to their home in Rochester, New York. The woman did not work for The Villages, but no one who did could have been more enthusiastic about that development near Ocala. I had heard about the place before, but I learned a lot more from her. I had assumed that it was not a place for me, but her infectious excitement about The Villages made me wonder about it.

In the small world department, he, too, had worked at Kodak, but what I found most intriguing about him is that he played in a band. I asked him what kind of music, and he said, “Eighties rock.” When I asked what kind of bands he was in when a kid and did they play anywhere, he said he had only learned to play the guitar when he was in his thirties. He, like the hosts, had said to himself, “Let me do something different.” He had. There was a lesson somewhere in there.

The other couple was younger, both divorced, and living in New York City. She reminded me of a young Bette Midler, and that made me like her immediately. He had gone to the University of Virginia business school and was back to attend some sort of college event that was held down the road from the bed and breakfast. We had passed the site–a large field that stretched out of sight over a hill—coming and going to the Foxfield Inn and learned that horse races of the steeplechase variety would be held there just after we left. She had trepidations. She did not like to see animals get hurt and cited some statistics about how many horses had been put down during a race meeting at Saratoga, New York. He, on the other hand, was excited about the event and said that the section where the undergraduates congregated was always good for laughs. I asked “Why?” He replied that the undergrads got very drunk and it was “so funny” watching them throw up and fall down. I did not know how to respond, and I remained quiet.

(Concluded on July 25.)

The People of 1787 chose a system that effectively binds us on how our president is to be chosen, but that method most often resulted in a president who has received the greater support from the voters. The People of 1787 also chose a national legislature that is not representative of the majority of the country’s people. And the People of 1787 expressly forbade later generations from changing an essential component of the legislature so that our national laws might truly reflect the consent of the governed.

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate must pass a bill for it to become law. The Constitution chosen by the People of 1787 provides that the House must be apportioned according to population. While this apportionment and the resulting House elections may be imperfect, we can say that the House represents the People. The governed have given a consent when the representatives act. But what about the Senate? Each state, no matter the number of people in that state, gets two Senators. In essence, the citizens of Wyoming, the least populated state, has sixty times the representation in the Senate as do the citizens of California. There were understandable reasons why the People of 1787 chose this constitutional construction, but would the People of today do so?

If we were setting out to form the government today, we might opt for the direct election of the president, and while amending the Constitution to reach that result is almost impossible to accomplish, it is theoretically possible. It is harder to conjecture what the People of today would choose if they wanted to change the basic composition of the Senate. But there is no point in even contemplating it. Under our Constitution, we are forbidden from changing equal representation in the Senate for each state.  Article V of the Constitution, which defines the amendment process, prohibits altering the Senate by stating “that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the senate.” Wyoming can always have representation in the Senate equal to California. Delaware can always have the same number of Senators as Texas.

The People of 1787 made it impossible for the People of any later time to reconsider this basic aspect of the Senate that gives more powers to some citizens than others.. The People of the eighteenth century prevented the People of today from deciding for themselves how the consent of the governed should be determined.

When we take pride in announcing that the United States is a government of “We, the People,” we should realize that the extolled People are often not us, but those from long ago. In crucial ways, the sovereign of this country may no longer by King George III, but it is the Americans of George’s time who are sovereign over us. We may not be controlled by a live King, but we are controlled by a dead generation of centuries ago.

And now conservatives seek to interpret the Constitution in ways that magnify the sovereignty of the People of 1787 over us. But that is for another day’s discussion.

If “We, the People” of the present United States were going to frame a government, would we really choose our present structure? Is it the best method for obtaining a constitutional goal–consent of the governed? We certainly would want to re-consider some key structural elements that can prevent the will of the People from prevailing. For example, we would think hard about the Electoral College.

While most often our president has been the person who has garnered the greatest number of votes, we, as has been demonstrated twice in the last generation, have no guarantee of that. Perhaps “We, the People” of today would see the electoral college as a result of understandable compromises that were necessary for the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, but we might now prefer the direct election of the President where every vote counts equally. This would produce a huge change in our presidential elections, and not just because the smaller states currently have a greater proportional representation in the Electoral College than the larger states or because sometimes the candidate with the most votes does not get inaugurated. The Electoral College in effect disenfranchises voters throughout the country.

I vote in New York, but my vote for president is, in a practical sense, meaningless. Last election, I could be confident that no matter whether I voted or not, New York’s electoral votes would go to Hillary Clinton because she was certain to get a majority of the state’s vote. The same can be said for California and other states. Similarly, voters in Texas and Alabama were casting meaningless ballots. Whether Trump or Clinton got more or fewer votes in most states simply did not matter. Voters in these states did not have much incentive to vote for President. Instead, the truly important voters throughout the country were in the “swing” states. Each swing-state voter, and non-voter, in effect counted much more than those in the safe states. When one person’s vote counts more than another’s, do we really have a government of the People?

This is not said because I thought Clinton should have won because she garnered most votes. No one should assume that if we had had the direct election of the President that Clinton would have been inaugurated. We can’t know that. With a direct election, all voters throughout the country would have had an equal incentive to vote because all votes would have mattered equally. An additional 50,000 votes for Trump or Clinton in New York or California or Texas would have changed nothing, but in a direct election, each of those votes would have mattered as much as the votes mattered in Wisconsin and Michigan. In all likelihood, with a direct election of the president, more people would vote than do now.

We also can’t assume that Clinton would have won in 2016 with a direct election because direct elections also would make campaigns different. If each vote in Alabama would matter as much as each vote did in Michigan, the candidates would have had to, shall we say, pander to every voter in Alabama as much as was done to get the Michigan votes. With equal appeals to every voter no matter the happenstance of residence, with an increased number of citizens voting, and with the majority determining the outcome, we might conclude that a direct election would more likely produce the consent of the governed than does the Electoral College system.

Today, in any presidential election, even when the candidate with most votes wins, can we really say that “We, the People of the United States” of today have chosen our national leader?

We have an electoral system chosen by the People of 1787, and those eighteenth century voters chose an amendment process that makes it almost impossible for the People of today to change our Electoral College. There is little point in even debating whether it is the best, or even a good, method of selecting a president. “We, the People United States” of today don’t really have a choice in this. Instead, the choices of the People of 1787 control us. If the People are sovereign, it is the People of 1787, not the People of today, who are the sovereigns on this matter.

(Concluded on July 20)

A seat on the Supreme Court is vacant. This means a season of idolatrous praise for the Constitution. We can expect the expression of a demanded fealty to our founding document. We may not ever say that the Constitution has the status of Holy Writ, but we know that it comes darn close. And just as we often hear the Bible’s initial words recited, we can expect to repeatedly hear the Constitution’s beginning passage: “We, the People of the United States, . . . do ordain and establish the Constitution of the United States of America.” Even though we hear these words, we don’t often consider  who the People are in “We, the People of the United States.”

We, the People of the United States do ordain” announced a radical concept. The “People” were creating a government. Elsewhere sovereignty resided in God-ordained rulers. In a momentous change, the Constitution rejected that. The People in adopting the Constitution were now the sovereigns, and the Constitution came to be seen as (nearly) God-ordained. The constitutional scholar Edward S. Corwin noted in The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law: “The Reformation superseded an infallible Pope with an infallible Bible; the American Revolution replaced the sway of a king with that of a document.” Under the Constitution, power would not run from the top down, but from the People up. The government did not have inherent powers or ones given by a god; instead, the government would only have the powers granted by the People.

The radicalism behind “We, the People” had already been announced in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their Just Powers from the Consent of the Governed. . . .” Rights were not granted to the people by the government; instead, rights were embedded in the individuals forming a society. The People do not exist to serve a sovereign monarch or government; instead, the government exists to serve the People.

This was radical stuff. Today we may point out the voting restrictions that existed in eighteenth century America to denigrate its limited notion of the People, but still “We, the People of the United States” was announcing a new concept in sovereignty, one that we feel still exists. Now women can vote and hold office; African-Americans can vote and hold office; people without real property can vote and hold office. We believe that our government now even more fulfills the promise of “We, the People of the United States” than it did in 1787. But our self-congratulatory pronouncements seldom truly examine whether “We, the People of the United States” of the twenty-first century have sovereignty. In important ways, the sovereign over our present country are not the People of today but the People of 1787.

The people of 1787 chose the government as defined in the Constitution. In 1787, the majority of the delegates to the state conventions controlled whether a state assented to the proposed Constitution. Since all the states adopted the Constitution, we can say that the People of the United States–as represented by a majority of the voters–formed the country.

But have the present People of the United States truly chosen this form of government? What have you done to select it? If you are like me, the answer is “nothing.” I was born into it. I suppose I could reject the government by becoming a citizen of another country, but I have taken no action to choose it. In some sense, only naturalized citizens have affirmatively chosen our government, and perhaps that is why they should be seen as more American than the rest of us. I live under a Constitution that the People of the eighteenth century and naturalized citizens have opted for, but not one chosen by the majority of Americans of today.

Perhaps we can say that present Americans choose the Constitution by not changing it. If we aren’t satisfied with it, we can amend it as Americans have done twenty-seven times. But can the People really modify the Constitution? It cannot be changed by a majority or even by a straightforward supermajority today. A tiny fraction of our citizens can prevent any amendment. That is because the People of 1787 chose a restrictive amendment process that prevents the People of the United States of future generations from truly governing themselves.

A constitutional amendment is proposed only if two-thirds of each House of Congress votes for it (or if it comes from a convention called for by two-thirds of the states for the purpose of proposing amendments, which has never happened.) The proposal becomes part of the Constitution only if it is approved by three-quarters of the states, with each state having one vote. Wyoming has one vote as does California, even though California’s population is sixty times greater than Wyoming’s. The nine largest states have a majority of this country’s citizens, but these people cannot control this amendment process. The sixteen largest states contain about two-thirds of the population, and the twenty-two most populated have about three-fourths of all Americans, but those twenty-two don’t even comprise a majority of the states, much less the three-quarters that are needed for an amendment.

When it comes to amending the Constitution, a Wyoming voter in effect counts as much as sixty California voters. Is that government by the People of the United States? Can we really say that the People of today control the process when a tiny fraction of the populace can prevent an amendment? Can we really say that the People have consented to the Constitution by not changing it? Isn’t it more accurate to say that the People of 1787 have forced an amendment process on us that prevents the People of today from being truly sovereign? And thus, at least in this instance, “We the People of the United States” means the People of 1787 are our sovereigns.

(Continued on July 18)

Good news and bad news. The good news is that even with my accumulated years I can still change a car tire in a chilly rain. The bad news . . . .

I am so old that I never got a participation trophy.

“There is a saying that every woman should have three daughters because that way there will be one to take care of her in old age.” Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible.

It is the time of year for Adirondack chairs. Has anyone ever found them comfortable?

Pele did not like to be called “Pele.” Hank Aaron did not like being called “Hank.”

Patrons at the restaurant registered complaints about the server with tattooed arms. I understood because I don’t like tattoos, but then I thought back to when I was the server’s age and some reviled me simply because of the length of my hair and a beard.

“You always dread the unfamiliar.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

The driver is lost. He stops the car, and he or a passenger lowers the window, yells to a pedestrian, and motions him to the car. The pedestrian comes over and bends down to talk to the person in the car. Since it is someone in the car who is asking for a favor, shouldn’t that person get out of the car and walk over to the pedestrian? Or will this rudeness disappear because of smartphone apps?

I don’t own a smartphone.

No one was home. The delivery service left the package on the stoop. It was stolen. The package contained Nutrisystem food. Was this thief dieting? Or was the thief grossly disappointed?

The teen-aged Anne Perry along with her friend brutally murdered the friend’s mother in New Zealand. The crime and its trial garnered much attention. The girls because of their ages served five only years in prison. Perry, after much struggle, later became a successful and prolific author of mystery stories and historical fiction. She became a devout Mormon. (The person who committed the crime with her became a devout Roman Catholic.) Christians proclaim a belief in redemption and forgiveness, but it has always been hard to extend charity to those who have done a terrible thing even when the rest of their lives has been admirable. If you met Anne Perry, wouldn’t you be fascinated by the fact that she had bashed in a woman’s skull with a brick? What would that say about you? What does it say about me thinking about this?

In thinking about the post-modernism of the New Right, consider the Washington State football coach who sent out on social media an altered video of an Obama speech. Many quickly pointed out that the speech as presented never occurred. The coach responded again and again with the challenge, “Prove it.” While this response may seem to indicate a belief that things can be true or false, the speaker took the stance that even though he was asserting something, it was not his responsibility to assure its truth. By commanding others to prove that his assertion was false, he was saying what he said should stand until then. In other words, he had no responsibility for the truth of his assertions. Instead, others did.  But then the coach shifted his responses and asked, “What is a fact?” Of course, if he does not know what a fact is, then he will never accept that his assertion has been disproved. His proposition should live on until disproved, he indicated, but at the same time, he will not necessarily accept the disproof. This intellectually dishonest position abandons all responsibility for the truth.

Conservatives have another twist on postmodernism: multiple versions of the truth. There is truth and there are facts, but they rapidly change. The President makes assertions and relays information, but often he gives us conflicting facts and assertions within days or even hours. Truth may not be subjective, but it is changeable. (His assertions of shifting truths and facts have led to cries that the President lies. In a previous post, I discussed On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfort and concluded that “liar” is not the correct term for Trump; “bullshitter” is. A liar is concerned about the truth; a bullshitter is not. It is fair to say that the President does not feel a responsibility for the truth of his pronouncements.)

That is dangerous enough, but the danger increases when others also don’t take a responsibility for facts and truth. Consider the ongoing disputes about the separation of families at the border. The Attorney General announces that the family separations are part of a policy to deter illegal immigration. Others later say that this is not a policy choice; instead, the law (adopted by Democrats) requires it. What is the true reason? The second speaker gave no indication of having talked with the AG to inquire about his earlier-asserted motives for the family separations. A person, of course, who felt responsible for speaking the truth would have done that.

Both the old leftist postmodernists and present conservatives are alike in absolving themselves of the responsibility of the often hard job of finding facts, of ascertaining the truth. It is enough to say that it could be true, it might be true, it has not been disproved to my personal satisfaction. The old leftists and the present conservatives are united in agreeing that they do not have to abide by the standards of good historical, scientific, sociological, anthropological inquiry. They don’t have to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of sets of data. Well, yes. Life is a lot easier without that hard work. Others can foolishly spend their time looking for facts and truth, but we don’t need to. The truth is what we want it to be. And this prevents them from having to change their views. They never have to confront what T.H. Huxley said about science: “The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” Leisure increases and life is simpler without a responsibility for discerning or establishing facts.

On the other hand, the present conservatives separate themselves from the old leftists; at least they don’t try to justify their irresponsibility about facts by referring to incomprehensible writers. I thank them for that.

Many of my work colleagues through the years could have been described as leftist in their political and philosophical bent. Some of them were proudly of the post-modernist variety who spouted the clichés that there was no objective reality; that truth and morality were only “contingent.” Truth varied depending upon your viewpoint. This meant not just that all opinions should be considered and analyzed, but that all opinions must be respected, which soon morphed into the idea that all opinions were of equal validity. If something were true for you, then it was true. Facts were always subjective. There was no objective truth.

Sometimes a fraternity-style lingo was involved. I would hear terms like “reification,” “ramification,” or “hermeneutics.” To me these were quintessentially postmodernist terms. I would ask what they meant, and I would get different responses. I learned that they meant whatever the utterer meant them to mean, which did not have to mean what another utterer meant. They seemed to have no objective definition. But they sounded impressive, and since they seemed to be without a fixed meaning, when I heard them I began to believe that their presence often hid the absence of an idea.

Philosophers were invoked, often French ones. I felt that my knowledge was incomplete so I tried studying Messrs. Foucalt and Derrida. I would read a paragraph but could not make sense of it. I would read it again. I would read it a third time, but meaning would not emerge. Perhaps I was not as bright as my colleagues who discussed this philosophy, but I doubted that, and I began to doubt those who claimed to understand so much of this philosophy. Emperors and new clothes came to mind. I saw terrible writers or thinkers whose thought was so unclear that they could not clearly express what they meant. I am of the school that if the writing is opaque, the thinking is too. But the books seemed definitely postmodernist. Their truths were “contingent.” Each reader read individual meanings into the words.

Back in the day, it was anti-conservatives who claimed truth was indeterminate and subjective, and right-wingers railed against those who could not tell right from wrong or could not tell there was a recognizable, firm truth.

We have had a switch. Now “conservatives” say something similar to what leftists said before. Rudy Giuliani, for example, has recently stated that truth is relative. Other conservatives talk about “alternative facts.” Conservatives deny evidence about climate change suggesting that science, too, is relative–that it is only political. Conservatives seem to have adopted postmodernism, but they have gone beyond it.

(Concluded on July 11)

José Antonio Rey Maria had no intention of making history when he rowed out into the Atlantic from the coast of Andalusia in southwest Spain on April 30, 1943.” Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory.

“The case comes in, or anyway it comes to us, on a frozen dawn in the kind of closed-down January that makes you think the sun’s never going to drag itself back above the horizon.” Tana French, The Trespasser.

“I shall never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths comical astonishment, with which on the morning of the third of January, eighteen hundred and forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a ‘stateroom’ on board the Britannia steampacket, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty’s mails.” Charles Dickens, American Notes.

“It was a pleasure to burn.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

“Through sixty-six separate books, 1,189 chapters, and hundreds of thousands of words, the Bible shares one extraordinary lesson: God loves you.” No listed author, Know Your Bible.

“Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.” Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere.

“I am always getting letters from people who want my job.”  Dave Barry, Dave Barry Talks Back.

“In the hospital of the orphanage—the boys’ division at St. Cloud’s, Maine—two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision.” John Irving, The Cider House Rules.

“It all started when Constantine decided to move.” Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

“Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife.” Ha Jin, Waiting.

“I struggle awake, and there she is. Russia.” David Greene, Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia.