Selected Readings

Selected Readings

by Stephen Jay Gould

The famous scientist Stephen Jay Gould recounts a personal story about his autistic son and the charming simplicity of calculating dates.

by Tim Page

My second-grade teacher never liked me much, and one assignment I turned in annoyed her so extravagantly that the red pencil with which she scrawled "See me!" broke through the lined paper. Our class had been asked to write about a recent field trip, and, as was so often the case in those days, I had noticed the wrong things:

by Paul Collins

The moment I opened my eyes I knew something was wrong. The sun wasn't up yet, and a cry was forming in Morgan's throat. I padded over to his bed, puzzled.

"Morgan?"

by Gisela Webb

What remains after the unraveling of mind, language, and knowledge in Alzheimer's was there in the beginning.

by Alan Dienstag

Few illnesses inspire the kind of dread as that caused by the prospect of Alzheimer's disease, which is understandable. For people in the early stages of the illness who are experiencing impairments but still entirely cognizant of the dissolution that lays ahead, the challenge is to construct a life in the shadow of an advancing darkness: to answer the question, "What is the point?"

This first chapter gives a good summary of the ideas behind Wright's newest book.

Selected segments from Robert Wright's conversations with digital physicist Edward Fredkin and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson.

"Let us look into each other's eyes and recognize each other's pain with empathy; let us see the human being behind the green and the blue. Let us force all to come to the table and not to a grave to talk."

The moving letter Robi Damelin wrote to the mother of the Palestinian man who killed her son.

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