The story of my grandmother confused people, especially Jewish Americans, who understandably assume that any story about escaping the war to the US is a happy one. But individual lives are more complicated than great sweeps of history, and while Sala was alone and frustrated in America, Alex and Henri went on to live gloriously successful lives in France.

In the morning before I set out [from Harper’s Ferry], the innkeeper said to me: If you go into the olde-timey candy store in the Lower Town, the woman who runs it will ask you if you have been there before. SAY YES, YOU HAVE. This is very important. If you say no, she will start explaining the olde times to you and she won’t stop, and you will never be able to leave. She warned me this the way Marya Morevna in The Death of Koschei the Deathless warns Prince Ivan not to open a certain dungeon door in her castle, and if he does, not to do anything asked of him by a man he might find chained up inside.

“Now, let me stop you right there,” Prince said. “Why did you write that?” It occurred to me that he might have flown me in from New York just to tell me that I knew nothing of his work. “The music I make isn’t breaking the law, to me,” he said. “I write in harmony. I’ve always lived in harmony—like this.”

Women’s bodies, you realize, are the true classical tradition: for millions of years, on macro and molecular levels, we’ve done intergenerational labor of preservation, replication and loss that dwarfs scribes’ transmission of a few hundred texts. You never treated your flesh like a temple, those summer afternoons you drank life and mimosas to the fullest; never thought of chromosomal decay all those nights in smoky pubs or long-haul flights. But all that time, you’d been a secret library, tending and discarding ancient ciphers just in case one zygotic codex — like the Veronese manuscript that rebirthed Catullus — might someday burst forth, be fruitful, and multiply.

A few weeks back I decided to push back on Twitter against the idea that Freud’s work was discreditable because, as a young man, he took a lot of cocaine. I have an interest in this question because, as a young man, I took a lot of cocaine. But that wasn’t quite my point. My point was if we to discredit those theorists who have done a lot of cocaine, we will be left with the stoners, which would, moreover, be a boring monocrop to harvest.

“My grandparents’ unconditional love became abruptly very conditional when my grandfather and I had the biggest fight he’d ever had with anyone, on the birth of his great-grandchildren, my twin daughters.

In Ísafjörður, the capital of Iceland’s remote Westfjords region, a Lutheran pastor compared eiderdown to cocaine. “I sometimes think that we are like the coca farmers in Colombia,” he said. “We [the down harvesters] get a fraction of the price when the product hits the streets of Tokyo. This is the finest down in the world and we are exporting it in black garbage bags.”

While [Eric] Vogel was imprisoned by the Nazis—first in the so-called model camp, Theresienstadt, and then later at the Auschwitz death camp—he and a dozen or so others played in a jazz band called the Ghetto Swingers. There were similar groups at many camps throughout Nazi-controlled Europe: musicians who were forced to perform, on command and under inconceivable duress, for the S.S.

Instead of seeing the urologist, I would now need to see an oncologist. For a few days I comforted myself by pretending that, because of my abiding interest in the mysteries and niceties of Being, I had to see an ontologist. Nobody except one of my fellow Irish novelists thought this was funny.

My favorite strip was "Peanuts," which, if I’d been paying attention, contained some lessons for me about the world that lay ahead. "Peanuts" was just one broken heart after another.

Last year, I found out someone was using my photos to catfish women. He stole dozens of my online photos – including selfies, family photos, baby photos, photos with my ex – and, pretending to be me, he would then approach women and spew a torrent of abuse at them. It took me months to track him down, and now I’m about to call him. I’m nervous, so much so that I have been putting it off for weeks. I sit down and dial. My palms are sweaty. He picks up.

“I became a total Republican playing this game,” one SimCity fan told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “All I wanted was for my city to grow, grow, grow.” Despite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve.

Easter (Pascha) is a big family holiday, and I was a total stranger, a xéni. Dorothy would have cringed if she had heard me trying to keep up my end of the Easter greeting: “Christ is risen,” a person says, and you are supposed to respond, “Truly He is risen,” but I got the ending on my adverb wrong and said, “Really? He is?”

Recently, the Beijing police took my brother sightseeing again. Nine days, two guards, chauffeured tours through a national park that’s a World Heritage site, visits to Taoist temples and to the Three Gorges, expenses fully covered, all courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security.