Daily Ideas

[P]eople borrowing books from the library were more likely to return their books if the librarian touched them lightly during checkout

We stayed together for the children — each was the other’s child. And we were both wordsmiths, cuddle-mad, and extremely playful… . All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.

The scaling up of penicillin has saved more lives than the first nuclear weapons took.

We spend hours surfing the web, which turns out to be much less challenging and enjoyable than the verb makes it sound.

Faced with endless religious warfare, Montaigne intuited that his best approach would be to tease his contemporaries away from intolerance. (Christians, he noted, were treating each other less kindly than Muslims, or even animals, did.) He could make toleration attractive not so much by argument as by a gentle mockery: the deflation of human pretensions in general and philosophical and religious ones in particular.