Mark Ayers

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
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Chance governs the scale of a life more than choice does. Choice governs its shape.

The century, country, parents, body and brain a person receives before making any decision will often matter more than anything decided later. Place of birth helps determine income, health and education. Recession can cripple a generation’s earnings. War can take its young. A gene may d...

Governments have always lied; the deeper danger was that power might damage the means by which a lie could be exposed, leaving citizens without enough common reality to argue about what should be done.

Bush v. Gore offers a useful, if imperfect, starting point for the American version of that decline. The Supreme Court intervened, ending the Florida recount and settlin...

Twenty minutes outside town is where the regional food lives. It’s the tamale stand operating out of a converted garage, the smoker in someone’s front yard with a hand-painted plywood sign, the farm stand selling whatever came up this week alongside jarred preserves with handwritten labels. The restaurant in town has a menu and a health inspection grade and a Yelp page. Twent...

A question is an offer, which is why curiosity carries a loneliness that no appetite for facts would explain. Curiosity reaches outward. It offers a question or an unfinished thought and waits for someone else to take it up. When the offer is returned with another question, both people enter ground that neither occupied before. When it meets a shrug, a joke or a quick change ...