A detour in Samoa, an encounter in a bar, a snowfall in Colorado

The father looked to the refs, the zebras in their black-and-white-striped shirts, but there was no hand in the air, no signal at all that a penalty would be called.

One of the reasons we’re lonely . . . is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world, and have called this “progress.”

[History] rushes on, as it always did, with two forces racing toward the future, one splendidly uniformed, the other ragged but inspired.

Decorah sat in the impact crater of an asteroid that had struck the earth hundreds of millions of years ago. One of the extinct giant sea creatures exhumed from its crust — the shrimp-looking Pentecopterus decorahensis — had been named after the town.

I resist seeing Trump as just a fluke or an aberration, because it’s too flattering to ourselves. When people say, “Trump’s not us,” I think, Maybe we need to see how he is us, so we can prevent this from happening again.