There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best-sellers--unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns wood-pulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books--a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many--every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in front to back. (This man owns books).

--Mortimer Adler, "How to Mark a Book," Saturday Review

We tend to think of ourselves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can't be unique and universal at the same time. Even individual free-swimming bacteria can be viewed as unique entities, distinguishable from each other even when they are the progeny of a single clone. Spudich and Koshland have recently reported that motile microorganisms of the same species are like solitary eccentrics in their swimming behavior. When they are searching for food, some tumble in one direction for precisely so many seconds before quitting, while others tumble differently and for different, but characteristic periods of time. If you watch them closely, tethered by their flagellae to the surface of an antibody-coated slide, you can tell them from each other by the way they twirl, as accurately as though they had different names.

--Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail

Hidden away in back-country pockets of upper New England lie the last remnants of a type of agriculture that once covered the greater portion of the Northeast. These are the few remaining small-family hill farms of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Their existence is an anachronism; too remote to be easily reached from Boston or New York, lacking the proper terrain for a ski resort or the necessary shorefront for a second-home development, these farming enclaves have retained much of their original character. And they still exhibit a sense of harmony between man and his natural surroundings.

--Richard W. Brown, "Last of the New England Hill Farms," National Wildlife

[In this passage, "Jim Crow laws" refer to the systematic practice of segregating and suppressing blacks, common in the first half of this century.]

Whatever else it was in 1951, Topeka [Kansas] was also a Jim Crow town. It had been one as long as anyone could remember.

There were no separate waiting rooms at the train and bus stations, and Negroes did not have to ride in the back of the local buses, but in most other ways it was segregated by law and, more effectively, by custom. There were eighteen elementary schools for whites and four for blacks. There was one colored hotel, the Dunbar, and all the rest were for whites. Almost no restaurants downtown served colored customers. Before the Second World War, a number of the better beaneries in town had a sign in the window reading: "Negroes and Mexicans served in sacks only," meaning they could take out food in bags but not eat on the premises. One movie theater in town admitted colored people to its balcony. Another, called the Apex, was for colored only. The other five movie houses were for whites only. The swimming pool at Gage Park was off-limits to colored, except one day a year when they were allowed in for a gala picnic.

--Richard Kluger, Simple justice: A History of Brown v. Board of Education

De gustibus non est disputandum--"There is no arguing about taste"--runs the Latin proverb. But taste did not just happen. Cultural, historical, and ecological events have interacted to cause frogs, for example, to be esteemed as a delicacy in southern China but to be regarded with revulsion in northern China. "Even though much remains unknown, tastes cannot be dismissed as inarguable or illogical; an attempt will be made here to discover why, as Lucretius [a Roman poet and philosopher] put it, "What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others." Among the approximately thirty million tribal people of India, a total of 250 animal species are avoided by one group or another. Most of these people will not eat meat from a tiger or any of various snakes, particularly the cobra. Although they say they feel a kinship with these animals, it is obvious that both are highly dangerous and that hunting them systematically would be foolish. Monkeys are avoided, probably because of their close resemblance to human beings; in these tribes, cannibalism is viewed with extreme horror. A reluctance to eat the females of edible species of animals has been attributed to veneration for the maternal role, but it could also be due to a policy of allowing the females to reproduce and provide more edible young. Many tribes avoid eating any animal that has died of unknown causes, an intelligent attitude in view of the possibility that the animal might have died from an infectious disease that could spread to humans. . . .

--Peter Farb and George Armalagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating