Debbie Foster

Those are the kinds of friends you want, where your heartbeat only raises to just the perfect pitch of anticipatory excitement, where all that awful effort of the beginning of things is over, the paths beaten and the shovels shelved. Look out for those kind. They are hard to find, and difficult to lose.

When we do not know what we should hope for, we can hope to learn.

The absolute dominance of the market isn't solely an ideological problem: it's also a practical, material impediment to storytelling, including the kind of stories that might be dangerous in a good way, or at least aesthetically interesting and worth having around. All we have is what the market gives us; all the art we enjoy was determined at some

The fact that Freud's structural model of the mind provides psychological fuel for narratives as different as The Iliad and Forbidden Planet strongly suggests that it captures essences, core dispositions, deep truths. And it continues to be relevant in an ever-changing, modern context.

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from

This is one danger that the current, hyperclinical story of illness seems designed to protect us from. If we are permeable the risks are infinite, and it's comforting to imagine firm borders guarding our soft places. As Biss points out, when it comes to the body, those borders are largely imagined. For the mind, whose boundaries are literally

I need randomness to be happy.

“Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” von Neumann wrote. “And that is what games are about in my theory.”

Once, in Florence, practicing her craft in her travel diary, Woolf reminded herself of the dangers of description: "What one records is really the state of one's own mind." I do love to be one; it is my favorite pronoun. It conjures me up, over there, where I can see myself, like a word tried out upon the page. One has arrived at the gate to Knole.