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If The World Were A Village Of 1,000 People

If the world were a village of 1,000 people, it would include: 584 Asians; 124 Africans; 95 eastern and western Europeans; 84 Latin Americans; 55 former Soviets (including Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and other national groups); 52 North Americans; 6 Australians and New Zealanders.

Dale

Dale and I sit in opposite corners of the nearly empty McDonald’s where I come to grade freshman English themes — he by the front window and I in the back near the restrooms. Twenty years ago we worked together, but now Dale is homeless, and I pretend not to know him.

Holiday Offer

Workers Should Be Happy

Kicking The Habit

Glide Path

They had circled for fifteen minutes before heading into the airport from the east, over the Hudson, across the turnpike. They should have come in from the north or south.

Friend Of The Sun

The Meek

“A tough row to hoe” is not a casual metaphor if you’ve actually done it. Unless you’ve picked cotton. My mother picked cotton as a child. For her, hoeing a garden was leisure compared to pulling the heavy sacks and slicing her hands to ribbons on the sharp, dry husks of the cotton boles.

The Worlds Are Unstable By Nature

It snowed three nights in a row, the first heavy snowfall in Livorno in more than twenty years. The Red Brigade, angered by US. involvement in Vietnam, were busy that month spray painting US GO HOME in jagged red letters all over the American-owned cars in town.

The Joy Of Sales Resistance

This is a book about sales resistance. We live in a time when technologies and ideas (often the same thing) are adopted in response not to need but to advertising, salesmanship, and fashion. Salesmen and saleswomen now hover about us as persistently as angels, intent on “doing us good” according to instructions set forth by persons educated at great public expense in the arts of greed and prevarication. These salespeople are now with most of us, apparently, even in our dreams.