I once returned home from a restaurant with a doggy bag full of deep-fried scorpions. The next morning, I poured them instead of imported raisin bran into my 11-year-old son’s cereal bowl. I wanted to freak him out. The scorpions were black and an inch long, with dagger tails.
“Scorpions!” shrieked my son, Roy. “Awesome!”

The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

There are two main conclusions: First, when bubbles are not based on bank lending, the mop-up-after strategy still looks pretty good. When it comes to bank-centered bubbles, however, there are many more things that a central bank can and should do. But raising interest rates to burst the bubble is probably not one of them.

“Each season had a distinctive aroma and its own set of sounds. In the winter ... the smell was of heavy wool socks drying near the stove. In spring it was the black soil warming and the sound of returning crows. Summer brought the smell of the poplars and the sounds of rustling leaves, frogs croaking in sloughs. ... In the summer came the grasshoppers.”

Few things on earth make me more insanely excited than U.P.S. Especially when I’m not expecting anything.

The good news: More Egyptians today can afford to live like Americans. The bad news: Even more Egyptians can’t even afford to live like Egyptians anymore. This is not good — not for them, not for us.

The takeover was like wind blowing over a moth-infested structure.

“When you see this salt, sad, dark thoughts take you,” he said.

In Saudi Arabia I once met two young members of the National Guard, Saleh and Abdullah. As we drank coffee in a cafe, I asked if they knew anything about Jews and Christians. They didn’t, but Abdullah seemed curious. He said he’d like to read a book about other faiths, but none was available in the kingdom.
Saleh objected. “Well, what if you read a story and it made sense to you so you believe it,” he said. “It can reduce your faith.”
They both agreed: Better not to read.

... a working-class anybody from an anyplace deep in Russia ...