You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer. What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that... 

I begin by reminding readers of this principle because I'm about to propose a theory that will offend both liberals and conservatives. But Occam's razor means, in effect, that if you want to disagree with it, you have a hell of a coincidence to explain. Theory: In US presidential elections, the more charismatic candidate wins. People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously. When one candidate... 

Don Quixote: Renaissance humor with a modern translation A Spanish knight, about fifty years of age, gave himself up so entirely to reading the romances of chivalry, that in the end they turned his brain, and nothing would satisfy him but that he must ride abroad on his old horse, armed with spear and helmet, a knight-errant, to encounter all adventures, and to redress the innumerable wrongs of the world. As is the case in this epic tale by Cervantes, modern... 

1. Right now Sabre, Galileo, Amadeus and Worldspan operate many millions of dollars of IBM and Unisys mainframes each to answer the vast majority of queries done by airline phone agents, airport desk agents, travel agents, and travel web sites (other than our own and our customers'). Their computers are housed in bomb-proof, fire-walled (literally) complexes in Kansas City, Denver, Germany and Atlanta, and mostly run assembly language code for performance reasons.... 

Dreaming is one of our most intimate experiences. Every dream, every night, is very unique. Our dream world, however confusing, frightening, or even sexy, reveals all of our secrets. Every human emotion and experience can be reflected in our dreams. They mirror our deepest desires, hopes, fears, and fantasies. Our hidden self, the one we try to keep from the outside world, emerges from our subconscious. We see ourselves in the raw, sometimes quite literally.... 

In Dante's Divine Comedy, Dante incorporates Virgil's portrayal of Hades from The Aeneid into his poem, and similarities between the Inferno and Hades can be drawn, however Dante wasn't attempting to duplicate Virgil's works. Although the Hell depicted in Dante's Inferno is essentially based on the literary construction of the underworld found in Virgil's Aeneid, in their particulars the two kingdoms are quite different. Virgil's underworld is largely undifferentiated,... 

Twentieth-century fiction in America, Europe, Africa, and Asia has all been much concerned with racial themes and issues, from Camus to Ralph Ellison, from Primo Levi to Alice Walker. This essay takes a specific area of fiction dealing with such themes, and looks at some favourite examples. Caribbean and African-American writers of fiction have always been preoccupied with racial themes. This, I believe, is due to their similar histories of enslavement and...