This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate LifeSome thought only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect

he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics

living in society

while among Marxist and left-wing scholars discredited interpretations of fascism as a "product of late capitalism" are revived

and Pomegranate Rose Sorbet

but simply that their plots

”--Roxanne L

Muslim life

but also as a great spiritual autobiography of one of the world's greatest religious thinkers

The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas―most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath

Author: Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey

Author: Wilhelm Anthony

from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial