Date: August 3, 2009
"Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don't want to wake up the person who's in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple's smooth machine and click it on."
preview | full record— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)
Date: 2010
"The idea of sex with a woman, of 'having a lesbian lover,' was simply unthinkable, like living alone at the North Pole or deciding to become a lycanthrope. If the thought existed at all, it was a mote, a sweet nothing--a little 'feather on the breath of God,' barely sensed now and then, but most...
preview | full record— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)
Date: October 31, 2011
"And then there were the experiments, each one a snapshot into the dark box of the brain."
preview | full record— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)
Date: May 3, 2012
"A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data."
preview | full record— Brooks, David (b. 1961)
Date: September 27, 2012
"The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation."
preview | full record— Lilla, Mark (b. 1956)
Date: July 1, 2013
"Many lines of poetry are so long-embedded in my memory that I find them appearing when I speak or write. Sometimes I am quoting. Sometimes I am unconsciously drawing from the reservoir."
preview | full record— Ebert, Roger (1942-2013)
Date: February 28, 2014
"A mind like a junk drawer crammed with kite string, Swiss Army knives and remote-controlled toys, or one that springs open as neatly as a well-organized tackle box?"
preview | full record— Itzkoff, Dave (b. 1976)
Date: May 19, 2014
"These days we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives."
preview | full record— Specter, Michael (b. 1955)
Date: February 9, 2015
"Now I know for sure that the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone."
preview | full record— Alexander, Elizabeth (b. 1962)
Date: August, 21, 2015
"But this summer, 'The New Yorker' published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared."
preview | full record— Egan, Timothy (b. 1954)