Date: June 14, 2017

"Sadly I fear that Shakespeare's 'Crassus,' now showing in the theater of my imagination, might be just as controversial as the new "Julius Caesar" were it staged as an evocation of the Trump era, since it would end with its slain-by-Parthians Crassus having molten gold, a symbol of his avarice, ...

— Douthat, Ross (b. November 28, 1979)

Date: June 30, 2017

"Other details, like the color of your childhood bedroom, have been tucked into deep storage and are much harder -- if not impossible -- to retrieve."

— Boser, Ulrich

Date: June 30, 2017

"In this sense, a forgotten memory is a lot like an old file on your computer. While the document still exists, you don't have a good way of getting to it, and today many memory researchers don't even use the word 'forgetting.'"

— Boser, Ulrich

Date: June 30, 2017

"Research explains why forgetting delivers this memory boost. Memories don't fly out of our brains like sparrows from a barn."

— Boser, Ulrich

Date: June 30, 2017

"Besides the occasional memory gaffe, the brain's approach to forgetting serves us well, and our retrieval failures help prune away memories that we don't really need."

— Boser, Ulrich

Date: June 30, 2017

"Or consider living with an unending library of easily recalled memories. It would be overwhelming: Dates, names, phone numbers -- they would all be constantly top of mind."

— Boser, Ulrich

Date: July 26, 2017

"But he is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control."

— Douthat, Ross (b. November 28, 1979)

Date: July 31, 2017

"Character is like concrete: You can make an impression when it's freshly poured, in its youth, one could say, but when it sets, it's impervious to alteration."

— Blow, Charles (b. 1970)

Date: May-June, 2017

"Memories continually change through repeated recollection, yet their tendency over time is to a reduction which mirrors that of photography--like a stack of snapshots repeatedly returned to. Such memories become archetypal crystallizations of identity--slides in the carousel of the mind."

— Stallabrass, Julian (b. March 16, 1960)

Date: May-June, 2017

"A full recollection--say of a person--almost always involves some visual re-experiencing of expressions, gestures and bearing, some of which are held frozen in the mind."

— Stallabrass, Julian (b. March 16, 1960)