It's one of the most difficult problems of aesthetic philosophy: What do we mean when we say that a song is sad? None of the big names--Aristotle, Kant, Croce–Benedetto, not Jim–come close to answering it.

—Have you ever fired a gun?

His mother hated blue jays, hated them with a passion she usually reserved for no-count trash who drank beer on their front steps and worked on their cars in the street.

I kill because I can’t stop. I kill because I can.

But this ache wouldn't leave me.

My grandfather rode with the Czar’s army. He was abducted from a village in Austria, trained to pillage and drink, plunder and rape, and ride the best horses that could be had. They were given the best vodka and the sharpest swords. They were all just b

But there it was, amid the “junk” set to be thrown out with the rest of his childhood, opened accidentally to the page of his Indiana Jones Action Journal about his winter formal when he was sixteen.

You’re finally in a band that can get through a rehearsal without someone strangling someone with an amp cord over creative differences. No one’s in jail, rehab, or MIA from a multi-day booze binge. The group has laid down a few quality tracks that don’t

She grew tired of waiting for her husband to give her a flower so she picked one for herself.

“How long you been waiting around?” he asks as he pockets my soggy ten-dollar bill. “For a jump or break in life?” I ask. He smirks. “I hear that.”

To be perfectly honest, I was lousy at my job. Or at least most aspects of it. The typing wasn’t a problem: I can get up to a hundred words a minute on a good stretch of unbroken text, and I’m pretty accurate. I even edited as I went, fixing passiv

One of Montejo's cap­tains has us drilling in the rain again. The sun hasn't shone for days and the air is sti­fling, like try­ing to breath under water. Every­thing looks gray except the palms. Each green leaf droops in the rain like a…

The title of the overdue book returned to a public library in San Francisco 100 years after it had been checked out? Forty Minutes Late.(Readers Digest, 04/17)In 1999, Kathy McKeon, Jackie Kennedy's former assistant, went to a Halloween party dressed in a Marge Simpson…

Our entire planet became poisoned by the monoculture system of agriculture. Mother Earth, who is the very soil we stand on, play on, dig in; Mother Earth, who is the very air we breathe, laugh in, talk in; Mother Earth, who is the very streams, river

Her boyfriend is into U.S. presidents and professional wrestling. He is reading biographies of both occupations and says this helps him to appreciate gray area, decisive action. Lives of great men, he explains.