Word: idea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Both The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game revolve around this dark, magical place called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Could you describe it and talk about when the idea for that very vivid place popped into your mind? The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is like the greatest, most fantastic library you could ever imagine. It's a labyrinth of books with tunnels, bridges, arches, secret sections - and it's hidden inside an old palace in the old city of Barcelona. It's a secret place that very few people know about, and in there...
...idea came to me probably in the late '90s. I think it came from something that I was becoming aware of at the time, which was the destruction of memory, the destruction of history. I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are. So thinking that and driving across the country and finding all these fantastic used bookstores that nobody was paying attention to - all these things were tumbling around my mind, and at some point I came up with this image of this place. It was clear that...
Until Friday morning, as a group of 20 international volunteers, we didn't have any inkling of what was going on at home. No idea that Hillary Clinton had broken her arm, or how Obama's health-care initiative was going. But as we gathered for breakfast at our orientation site Friday morning, people periodically rushed in, clutching their cell phones, exclaiming, "Michael Jackson died!" —the one piece of news their parents thought important enough to share via text message from the U.S. Suddenly, home felt a whole lot closer...
...medicine, the idea would be to reward quality rather than quantity, to give providers incentives to keep us healthy and reduce unnecessary treatments, to encourage doctors and hospitals to promote a culture of low-cost, high-quality care. One reason the Mayo Clinic already provides low-cost, high-quality care is that it keeps its doctors on salary, insulating them from fee-for-service inducements to overserve; unfortunately, Mayo is hemorrhaging cash on its Medicare patients, because the current system penalizes responsibly conservative care. Doctors don't get paid for thinking about a case or returning a phone call...
Netanyahu and Obama have made some progress on other aspects of restarting a peace process. The Israeli leader has finally accepted the idea of a Palestinian state, albeit with limited sovereignty, and he has signaled an intent to ease the Gaza blockade, remove some West Bank roadblocks, release some Palestinian prisoners and transfer more security responsibility in West Bank towns to Palestinian forces. But in publicly and repeatedly demanding a settlement freeze, even after Israel objected, Obama has made it not only a test of Netanyahu's bona fides as a peacemaker, but also of U.S. credibility. The President hasn...