I’m always searching for mystery, something unexpected and dissonant, something to be curious about.

by gems I do NOT mean the author’s ideas or theories. Those are the last things we want. We want to form our own ideas. By gems I mean a little glimpse of something surprising and dissonant and mysterious – a person or a situation or a moment in history where you think, ‘I didn’t expect that ’ or ‘I don’t understand that , I’d like to go down a rab... See more

a good story, by definition, has to be smarter than the person who wrote it. Because if it’s less smart, that means the writer wasn’t writing a story but assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. Most of the masterpieces I’ve encountered were smarter than their creators, and often more decent and purely good than them, too.

Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think ultimately it would be, are you benefiting the people in proximity to you? And truly benefiting them. And that in itself is, how would you know?

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, how would you know is, I think, often a harder problem that we give it credit for. Why in proximity?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Well, I think that’s the place to start. And s... See more

I think in a lot of these Eastern systems, the delusion is that we’re trapped inside this little machine that thinks it’s central, and permanent, and all-important and is always thinking it’s about its little victory narrative. But when you step out of it for a second, you see that it’s just a temporary construction of neurology, or karma, or whate... See more

if we look at ourselves, we’re kind of set up to be these little Darwinian survivors. So we’re given this really cool sensory apparatus, and a brain, and everything. And you know, that stuff is there to help us propagate the species. And the intersection between our perceptions, and understanding, and what’s actually true are pretty small and prett... See more