There is, however, at the center of the colossus, in the pelvis of the machine, a human being: a straight-faced, hard-working, pleasure-seeking person, who is often meticulously groomed. He likes various flavors and spices. He has experienced feelings of shyness. He may, at one time or another, have been moved to an obscure self-doubt by [...]

I am picturing the human brain as a map of lights in the dark, lights that flare up, in complex patterns, when we see something we recognize, when we make a decision, when we think of a word. In the apartment building across from mine, American Idol comes on, and a hundred tiny televisions start [...]

If it’s true that the tents are about to be packed, the cages broken down, the sawdust swept, the clowns sedated, the daredevils shot, the lions zipped into their traveling sweaters; if it’s true that the circus is about to skip town, on a cloud of greasepaint and diesel fumes, leaving behind only crushed flowerbeds, [...]

There’s a certain quality that comes into the facial expressions of men who, somewhat battered and chastened by life, somewhat rumpled by it, somewhat the worse for wear, nevertheless retain an unusually clear sense of the virtue that guides their actions. Disillusioned more by the world’s failure to endorse their illusions than by any realization [...]

Malarial lowlands. Brown mountains rigid in the distance, like the bones of the corpse of the sky. Wind, like a disease, swelling on the fens: mixing the shadows, sifting the sedge, glimmering along the grassy pools. There is a moon in the bruise-colored air: so it must be twilight. It might have been any time [...]

Robbie Savage’s hair and Robbie Savage have been around football for such a long time that it’s easy to take them for granted. Together they’ve played 154 games for Crewe Alexandra, 374 for Leicester City, 164 for Birmingham, and countless more for Blackburn and Derby—and the amazing thing is that they’ve always played for [...]

I have splendid truths to tell about Yakubu Aiyegbeni, the thundering Toffee, who crushes parked cars with his fists, eats junkyards, and cracks bank vaults with his skull—not because he hits them so hard, but because he knows the combination. Maybe you’ve seen him on a fine afternoon, just walking down the street with [...]