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Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) witnessed the full range of experiences that life on this planet has to offer, from war to love and everything in between. During an interview he gave in Jerusalem in 1994, he said, “I can stand on my balcony and tell my children, ‘Over there I was shelled for the […]

I hope you won’t merely wander around the frontier. I hope you’ll undertake a meticulous yet expansive exploration of that virgin territory. Here are some tips on how to proceed: Formulate specific questions about what you’re looking for. Develop a hypothesis for the experiments you want to carry out. Ignore what doesn’t interest you and […]

At a family planning conference in Beijing, a researcher from Ghana presented testimony about tribal issues that he had in part gleaned through interviews with dead ancestors. He said that spirit mediums had acted as his “translators.” When he was met with skepticism from colleagues, he was defensive. “If I only heard from the living,” […]

When Sheelah Ryan won $55 million in the Florida lottery, she used the money to create an organization dedicated to helping the disadvantaged. “I guess I’ve disappointed a lot of people,” she told a reporter. “I could be traveling all over the world, or have a beautiful mansion on the ocean, or have a chauffeur-driven […]

The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown has a unique way of stimulating his imagination: He dons his gravity boots and meditates on complex storylines while he’s inverted. It’s also a good way to overcome writer’s block. “You think differently upside-down,” he says. Do you have an equivalent method for providing gentle shock therapy to […]

When I did a performance in Santa Fe a few years ago, a woman in the audience came up to me after the show and made a sardonic proposal: Would I like to join her twelve-step program for writers who are overly fond of vivid adjectives and adverbs? With all the uppity mock politeness I […]

“Behind every face, there are a thousand faces,” says film director Bryan Singer, who worked on two of the X-Men movies. He deals with professional actors, who specialize in revealing the myriad faces beneath the surface. But I think his assessment applies to lots of people, especially you Scorpios — although it must be said […]

At a family planning conference in Beijing, a researcher from Ghana presented testimony about tribal issues that he had in part gleaned through interviews with dead ancestors. He said that spirit mediums had acted as his “translators.” When he was met with skepticism from colleagues, he was defensive. “If I only heard from the living,” […]

“Behind every face, there are a thousand faces,” says film director Bryan Singer, who worked on two of the X-Men movies. He deals with professional actors, who specialize in revealing the myriad faces beneath the surface. But I think his assessment applies to lots of people, especially you Scorpios — although it must be said […]

I hope you won’t merely wander around the frontier. I hope you’ll undertake a meticulous yet expansive exploration of that virgin territory. Here are some tips on how to proceed: Formulate specific questions about what you’re looking for. Develop a hypothesis for the experiments you want to carry out. Ignore what doesn’t interest you and […]