Number of words: 63 As classicists point out, those video games update the ancient Greek legend of Oedipus and the sphinx. The sphinx devoured anyone who couldn’t answer her riddle: “What is it that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” Excerpted from page number … Read more

Number of words: 135 “Let’s play a game of Russian roulette,” begins one interview stunt that is going the rounds at Wall Street investment banks. “You are tied to your chair and can’t get up. Here’s a gun. Here’s the barrel of the gun, six chambers, all empty. Now watch me as I put two … Read more

Number of words: 136 We tend to put a great deal of faith in travelling. Bacon said it was education for the younger, experience for the elder. It is “broadening,” we tell ourselves; it’s what we’ll do when we retire and our lives are our town. It grows us up, lets us change. Who has … Read more

Number of words: 592 Among the most interesting observations in the thirty volume between 1915 and 1941 are those Woolf made about diary-keeping itself. She is, in her diaries, one of the great critics of the genre. The activity is, after all, so queer, so ad hoc, and supposedly so private, that it doesn’t seem … Read more

Number of words: 149 Time-lapse photography offers odd pleasures: Gaudy  flowers blooming in a second, skyscrapers flinging them selves upward in a half a minute. Reading someone’s life in one of these huge chronicle diaries can be a little like watching it that way:  you go through a year in maybe an hour or two. … Read more

Number of words: 735 J.M Barrie once wrote that the “life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” On the whole, I think, this is … Read more

Number of words: 137 Longafter the practical value of explorers records has become obsolete, their appeal  for ordinary readers remains strong. Richard  Hakluyt knew this when he collected, in his Voyages, the stories of the discoveries made by sixteenth century pioneers. It may be an aeronautical and diplomatic snap to get into China today, but … Read more