Personal Highlights:

• The teacher who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be driven away immediately; no damage is done by...
• All funeral parlors have their offices as close to street level as possible. Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be...
• For example, how great the difference was between our days. While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and...

Personal Highlights:

• But, in reality, scientific theories are not ‘derived’ from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They...
• how can knowledge of what has not been experienced possibly be ‘derived’ from what has?
• To bridge the logical gap, some inductivists imagine that there is a principle of nature – the ‘principle of induction’ – that makes inductive inferences...

Personal Highlights:

• In 1865, nine years after Sikhdar’s computations had been confirmed, Waugh bestowed the name Mount Everest on Peak XV, in honor of Sir George Everest, his predecessor as surveyor general.
• The first eight expeditions to Everest were British, all of which attempted the mountain from the northern, Tibetan, side—not so much because it presented the...
• And thus, shortly before noon on May 29, 1953, did Hillary and Tenzing become the first men to stand atop Mount Everest.

Personal Highlights:

• Thus it should come as no surprise to anyone that China is both the largest exporter of new goods to the United States and the largest importer of American recycling.
• These odd terms aren’t just relics of an eccentric business; they’re the means by which random waste is transformed from a jumble of trash into...
• China lacks ready access to sufficient raw materials of its own to build all those subways, so in very short order it’s become a net...

Personal Highlights:

• As I show in chapter 2, ship lines and railroads had been experimenting with containers for a half century before Malcom McLean’s trip to Jersey...
• A transport innovation of the 1880s, the refrigerated rail car, made meat affordable for average households by allowing meat companies to ship carcasses rather than live animals across the country.
• When transport costs are high, manufacturers’ main concern is to locate near their customers, even if this requires undesirably small plants or high operating costs....

Personal Highlights:

• “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.”...
• While Musk didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do in space, he realized that just by being in Los Angeles he would be surrounded...
• A desert town about one hundred miles from Los Angeles, Mojave had become a hub for aerospace companies like Scaled Composites and XCOR. A lot...

Personal Highlights:

• Chrysanthemum farmers have a problem since Mother’s Day comes in the spring but the flowers normally blossom in the fall as the days get shorter....
• Plants were differentiating between colors: they were using blue light to know which direction to bend in and red light to measure the length of the night.
• Ecologically, this makes a lot of sense. In nature, the last light any plant sees at the end of the day is far-red, and this...

Personal Highlights:

• Italy, Germany, and Japan were building huge military machines, America scrapped its navy, reduced its army, tried to lull itself into a belief that trouble...
• Seniority therefore added, in George Goodwin’s words, “a new non-constitutional dimension … to our constitutional system of separation of powers.”
• It was, in many cases, the rock on which they based their campaigns for re-election, since their more sophisticated constituents—the ones most deeply concerned about...

Personal Highlights:

• When people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection:...
• You don’t need to cultivate separateness in the early stages of falling in love; you still are separate. You aim to overcome that separateness. As...
• It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy. Maybe he can love her, but it’s clearly much harder for...

Personal Highlights:

• Maybe it’s the beer (or Cohen’s doe eyes), but I get a little jolt when he says this. I realize that I’ve seen French mothers...
• Newborns typically can’t connect sleep cycles on their own. But from about two or three months they usually can, if given a chance to learn...
• The crèche lady’s look also reveals that on this, too, there are no sparring camps in France. Parents don’t anguish about how often their children...

Personal Highlights:

• “Colonialism. The Germans and Belgium separated us and made it a divide and conquer mentality. Post-independence in 1961, we started to fight, and then it...

Personal Highlights:

• So I was kept inside. Other than those few instances of walking in the park, the flashes of memory I have from when I was...
• We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.
• They were still Chinese. But, unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision,...