A Well Turned Phrase

A fool is known by his speech, and a wise man by silence.

—Pythagoras

A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.

— Daniel Dennett

…(W)e are surrounded by the Lululemon crowd at this beautiful outdoor cafe. What Tom Wolfe called the Social X-Rays are brunching, and unlike my kids and me, they did not order extra pancakes on top of their regular orders. We seem to have to taste as much variety as possible, so every order has an extra side order. This crowd though is slightly le

Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken

— From Hans Christian Andersen's "The Story of a Mother"

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dicti

In the end, recovering the mix of the original and the present in a car under restoration means coming to terms with “patina,” and if you hear someone talk of a car’s patina, you have probably run into someone who is a practicing automotive archeologist, whether or not he or she knows it. To the restorer obsessed with the image of the car the “way

Saints always have a past and sinners always have a future.

— Oscar Wilde

SpaceX's flight test of its Starship spacecraft ended with a "rapid unscheduled disassembly."