Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

"To society he's blind," said Ben's mother, "but that doesn't make him handicapped. He just can't see."

She also said, "One thing that I truly get back from Ben being blind is that he truly sees people from within.

We Neglect Recluses At Our Peril: Proust, Thoreau, and St Jerome in The Desert

We Neglect Recluses At Our Peril: Proust, Thoreau, and St Jerome in The Desert

In his prolonged solitude Marcel Proust created a new aesthetic out of tea biscuits, stewed chicken, twinges of jealousy, and found the most authentic thing about himself in that shadow world. Even in his tough Yankee pragmatism, Henry David Thoreau said “I have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hill-side had fed my genius.”

Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Dawkins' Memes and Kurzweil's Singularity

Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Richard Dawkins' Meme Theory and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity

As a goat farmer, Jaron Lanier supported his way through college. While growing up, he lived far from cities and near Mesilla, New Mexico, with his father in tents until they built a house centered around a hippie-esque geodesic dome designed by Jaron. 

Polish Exchange Student's Host Parents from Hell

Christian Fundamentalist Host Parents from Hell for Polish Exchange

Student

Michael Gromek

Landing in Greensboro, North Carolina, Michael Gromek, 19, stepped off the plane from Poland. He had come as an exchange student and looked eagerly for his host family at the airport. When they found one another, he felt like running back toward the plane. They met him holding a Bible, and saying,"Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us." 

George Berkeley: Rocks Are Not Physically Real

Bishop George Berkeley

George Berkeley: A Rock Is A Mental Perception. There Is No Matter. Only Mind and Perceptions

George Berkeley (1685 –1753), known as Bishop Berkeley, was an Irish philosopher whose main theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived.