Will > Books: nonfiction‎ (504)

Is it shouting into the wind to make the case to a Republican Congress for impeaching a president of their own party? The answer is no. Once Trump

Is it shouting into the wind to make the case to a Republican Congress for impeaching a president of their own party? The answer is no. Once Trump becomes more of a liability than an asset to the GOP, the party may be willing to turn on him through impeachment. Republicans in Congress have no loyalty to Donald Trump…

But even if we muddle through Trump’s presidency, it should be a reminder that the presidential elections are as fallible a method of selecting an executive as any other. American government is built so that a president can be removed and a duly elected co-partisan is always present to step in and take his place. Impeachment is not a power we should take lightly; nor is it one we should treat as too explosive to use. There will be presidents who are neither criminals nor mental incompetents but who are wrong for the role, who pose a danger to the country and the world.

It is a principle that sounds radical until you say it, at which point it sounds obvious: Being extremely bad at the job of president of the United States should be enough to get you fired.

...one puzzle of daily life at the villa was this: How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society?

...one puzzle of daily life at the villa was this: How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society?

“Her confidence could disarm even the most hostile,” he told an anonymous reporter, adding that her strength stemmed from her love of animals. “It wasn’t just that she identified with them,” he explained, “but from time to time she seemed to shed her own human traits and become a panther or a hyena. Then, able to adopt their fighting instinct, she arose as a fearless defender of her kind.”

One spring day, Jan brought home [from a pig farm that had been set up at the zoo] a newborn piglet whose mother was just butchered, thinking that [their son] Rys might like it as a pet…they named him Morys, and at two and a half weeks, Morys looked like “piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh…very clean, pink and smooth…Morys lived in the so-called attic of the villa, really a long narrow closet that shared a terrace with the upstairs bedrooms, and each morning Antonina found him waiting outside Rys’s bedroom door. When she opened it, Morys “ran into his room, oinking, and started jostling Rys’s hand or foot until Rys woke, stretched out a hand, and scratched Morys’s back. Then the pig arched, catlike, until he looked like the letter C, and grunted with great contentment,’ uttering a quiet noise between a snort and a creaking door.

In 1940 when Jews were ordered into the Ghetto, [a progressive orphanage, started by a well known author and pediatrician Henryk Goldszmit (pen name Janusz Korczak)] moved to an abandoned businessmen’s club in the “district of the damned,” as he described it in a diary written on blue rice paper that he filled with details of daily life in the orphanage, imaginative forays, philosophical contemplations, and soul-searching. It’s the reliquary of an impossible predicament, revealing how a spiritual and moral man struggled to shield innocent children from the atrocities of the adult world during one of history’s darkest times.” Reportedly shy and awkward with adults, he created an ideal democracy with the orphans, who called him “Pan Doctor.” There, with wit, imagination, and self-deprecating humor, he devoted himself to a “children’s republic” complete with its own parliament, newspaper and court system. Instead of punching one another, children learned to yell “I’ll sue you!”

Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy personnel have suffe

Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy personnel have suffered personally slanderous and falsely prurient attacks in the media. Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG [United States government] employee spouses had met accidental deaths. Home intrusions have become far more commonplace and bold, and activity against our locally engaged Russian staff continues at a record pace. We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB.

John Beyrle, US ambassador in Moscow, confidential State Department cable, November 9, 2009

Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target’s private or family life so they are unable to continue their “hostile-negative” activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim’s private life. They would then devise a strategy to “disintegrate” the target’s personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children.

In her study [of Zersetzen, Sandra] Pingel-Schliemann concludes: “These days a total dictatorship doesn’t need to use methods of open terror to subdue people for years and make them weak. Moreover, developments in technology and communications offer future dictators ever more subtle possibilities for manipulation.” Her comments strike me as prescient. In Herr J.’s case Stasi operatives had to creep round at night hanging individual notes in his village with the words: “Whore,” “Drunkard,” “Speeder” and “Bigmouth.” Today’s Kremlin bloggers and faceless state patriots have it much easier. They need only reach for their mouse.

…people’s search for information is, in itself, information. When and where they search for facts, quotes, jokes, places, persons, things, or help,

…people’s search for information is, in itself, information. When and where they search for facts, quotes, jokes, places, persons, things, or help, it turns out, can tell us a lot more about what they really think, really desire, really fear, and really do than anyone might have guessed. This is especially true since people sometimes don’t so much query Google as confide in it: “I hate my boss.” “I am drunk.” “My dad hit me.”

By forcing the party, and particularly his fellow southerners to reckon with the country’s ongoing racial strife, [Lyndon] Johnson had thrown open

By forcing the party, and particularly his fellow southerners to reckon with the country’s ongoing racial strife, [Lyndon] Johnson had thrown open the doors to a growing and increasingly liberal and African American base. But he had also driven scores of white Democrats into the arms of the Republican Party and a growing conservative movement that was quickly organizing around opposition to all that his administration had stood for.

Sanders’s difficulty connecting with the mass of black voters was a sore point for his campaign, particularly since it was the key factor preventing him from gaining the nomination of the party he’d only formally joined several months after announcing his bid for president in April 2015.

…the real explanation was simpler. Sanders had a fundamental discomfort addressing the immovable barrier of race, which loomed over his economic-based complaint like a giant pylon. He often struggled to incorporate Black Lives Matter into his message, even as many of its young leaders flocked to his banner.

Despite all the advances made in the LGBTQ community, many of them can be rolled back—quickly, easily, and effectively.

In 1812 Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that took redrawing he state’s district lines to such extremes that one district looked like a salamander. The term "gerrymander" was born and has been used ever since to describe this practice.

… what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the “waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets. The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to—rather than continue to subtract from—the nation’s wealth. Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor, felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export. In return they would be kept from a life of crime, avoiding, in Hakluyt’s words, being “miserably hanged,” or packed into prisons to “pitifully pine away” and die.

During the colonial period, the right to vote for the lower house of colonial legislatures had been defined in traditional British terms: Only people who had freehold landed property sufficient to ensure that they were personally independent and had a vested interest in the welfare of their communities could vote. - from The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828 by Donald Ratcliffe

Franklin understood that maintaining class differences had its own appeal. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he edited, an article was published in 1741 that exposed why people preferred having a class hierarchy to having none. Hierarchy was easily maintained when the majority felt there was someone below them. “How many,” the author asked, “even of the better sort,” would choose to be “Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and Tyrannical Rule over all below them?” There was something desirable, perhaps even pleasurable, to use Franklin’s utilitarian axiom, in the feeling of lording over subordinate classes.

A prison official said it all: “One dies, get another.” Poor whites were inexpensive and expendable and found their lot comparable to suffering African Americans when it came to the justice system. Nothing proves the point better than the fact that both black and white convicts were referred to as "niggers."

In principle, then, the Rorschach test rests on one basic premise: Seeing is an act not just of the eye but of the mind, and not just of the visua

In principle, then, the Rorschach test rests on one basic premise: Seeing is an act not just of the eye but of the mind, and not just of the visual cortex or some other isolated part of the brain but of the whole person. If this is true, a visual task that calls upon enough of our perceptual powers will reveal the mind at work.

Descended from artists on both sides of his family, Hermann Rorschach had a lifelong belief in perception as the point of intersection between mind, body, and world. He wanted to understand how different people see, and at the most fundamental level, seeing is, as the painter Cezanne said of color, “the place where our brain and the universe meet.”

Alone among the pioneers of psychology, Rorschach was a visual person and created a visual psychology. This is the great path not taken in mainstream psychology, even though most of us today, even the talkiest and most bookish, live in a predominantly visual world of images on surfaces and screens. We evolved to be visual. Our brains are in large part devoted to visual processing—estimates run as high at 85 percent—and scientists are beginning to take that fact seriously; advertisers in quest of “eyeballs on the page” started to take it seriously a long time ago. Seeing runs deeper than talking.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard, after describing this book to someone: “It’s like the Rorschach test is a Rorschach test~ It can mean anything!” I want to say No, it isn’t. However tempting it may be to “present both sides” and leave it at that, the inkblot test is something real, with a particular history, actual uses, and objective visual qualities. The blots look a certain way; the test either works in a given way or it doesn’t. The facts do matter more than our opinions of them.

In his discussion of Genghis Khan’s career, Gibbon inserted a small but provocative footnote, linking Genghis Khan to European philosophical ideas

In his discussion of Genghis Khan’s career, Gibbon inserted a small but provocative footnote, linking Genghis Khan to European philosophical ideas of tolerance and, surprisingly, to the religious freedom of the emerging United States.

As a child I became engrossed in reading about Marco Polo, Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan and developed a fascination with Mongolia. In college I tried to go to Mongolia to continue that interest, but the Cold War prevented it. I put aside that interest and continued with others that I had, but when Mongolia opened in the 1990's I went to visit more out of curiousity than for any planned work. Once there, the passion of my childhood flamed higher than ever. Although I did not speak the language I felt spiritually, intellectually and emotionally at home. - from the Asia East interview

It was one of those times when my wife, in a flurry of OMGs, blew through our front door and announced in full capital letters. YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE THIS. The this, of course, was the book under review here, Shop Cats of New York. If she had done this twenty years earlier, I would not have been very interested. And my first wife probably would have wondered just who the hell that woman was. At that time I was not only cat-free, but the proud owner of a considerable cat allergy. Things change.

As happens with about half the marriages in the USA, my first went the way of dial-up. In late 1998, I was looking for an apartment, but also someone else to share the rest of my life with. I suppose one could say that at the time I was a bit of a stray, not exactly homeless, but certainly unsettled. I partook of Match.com, including the sort of profile millions of other people have penned. Mine was probably typical enough, blah-blah-blah, three kids, blah-blah-blah, systems analyst, blah-blah-blah Mets fan, blah-blah-blah, and Sorry, no cats. Allergic. I met several women, but was particularly intrigued by one. Despite the fact that we had engaged in a considerable series of on-line exchanges, it turned out she had issues with reading.

The first time I went to visit my new friend at her place, I was in for a surprise. She was sharing her apartment. Her room-mates kept their distance but they made their presence felt anyway. In short order my eyes began to itch. Soon after, my nose began to run. Within thirty minutes of my arrival I was struggling to breathe and bolting for the door. Ummm, about that cat thing.

I guess she was interested enough in me to risk not copping to the kitties. And I guess I was interested enough in her to take on a steady diet of whatever allergy med seemed to work at the time. It also seemed a reasonable thing to try to build up a bit of tolerance. About a year later, I was living in a garden apartment in Park Slope, with access to a back yard, when I started getting a regular visitor. This good-sized black cat showed his puss near my back door more and more. I started putting out some food for him. Then left my back door open until he began risking visits inside. After a few of these. I closed the door behind him. He did not seem to mind. I called him Pitch. He was my first cat.

According to Neergard pharmacist Lana, “Ivy was found as a wee kitten pulling tricks on the gritty streets of Brooklyn’s Park Slope.”

We moved in together in 2001, marrying later that year. My Pitch joined her Madison, Winnie and Bo. There would be more. One morning a small stray tried to follow Mary Ann into the subway. It was not her first encounter with this kittie. She was so small we believed her to be a kitten. Concerned for her safety, she brought the wee beastie back upstairs before heading out to work again. I was not thrilled at the prospect of yet another cat being added to our pack. We put her in my daughters' bedroom. That night when Mary Ann got home from work, she came into the room, and there I was like a thief with his hand in the cookie jar, holding this little cat in my arms in the same way I had held my tiny humans not so long ago. Forgotten was the notion of trying to find another home for her. I looked up at my wife, sheepishly, and said, “She had me at meow.” Turned out she was as large as she would ever get. We called her Little Cat. or LC for short.

Customers come in with their dogs assuring the staff they are ok with cats, to which the staff responds, “Well, our cat is not ok with dogs. If you see Tiny up in the shelves following you, your dog is being stalked.”

In the mid aughts, a work friend of Mary Ann’s at Harper was about to relocate out of the country. His wife had gotten a job with the State Department, and they had very little notice before they would have to leave. In order to be able to take their two cats along, they would have had to put them into seriously prolonged quarantine. They were not confident that both would survive the experience. That is how Anakin and Kiki joined our herd.

When I asked the only desk-less guy there [MPH messenger service] if he was security, he nodded in Sammy’s direction. “He’s security.”

In 2011, a surprise was found at my mother-in-law’s place in Wilkes Barre. A stray had taken up residence on the back porch. When Mary Ann, there for a visit, picked her up, there were two babies beneath her. Her mother was actually ok with taking them in. The mom was named Isabelle and the babies were Oscar and Felix. We had intended to head out there for a visit a few weeks later. Get Isabelle to the vet, and have the babies checked out. But Hurricane Irene had other plans, and we did not manage the trip until enough later to matter. Isabelle had managed to get mommified again, this time with Scout and Boo. So we had a triple-A team of cats in residence in Wilkes Barre. It was good company for mom, who was getting on. We helped out with cat costs, buying food, litter and dealing with vets. We had expected to bring them to Brooklyn over time. It was during this period that another arrival turned up. Tabitha had been showing up in the Wilkes Barre back yard looking for food, and getting it. But came inside a time or two when it got very cold. One time was when we were there on a visit. She came into the kitchen, but was so terrified of the other cats that she hid under the stove. To our great surprise mom-in-law asked us to take her back with us, afraid that her brood would harm the outsider. In January 2015, my mother-in-law passed, peacefully, in her sleep, a favorite German shepherd companion at her side. Our triple-A team would be moving up to the majors. Well, somewhat. Some of them were particularly gifted at evading capture. But we did bring home Isabelle, Scout and Oscar.

We have lost several of our four-footed children to the ravages of age. They had lived lives that were respectably lengthy, but it was heart-breaking to lose them. There would be two more sets of incomings. We have a friend in Wilkes Barre who is a registered cat-rescuer. She is a saint, in our view, who has helped many a feline shift from living on the streets to finding a safe, loving home. However, there was a time when she needed a temporary place for many of her wards. Mom’s place in W-B was offered, and a dozen or so squatters took up residence. Two of them took a shine to Mary Ann and me when we were there. The result was Nala and Julian. On another trip to W-B, we had intended to retrieve Felix from the cat angel of W-B, but he was clearly happy to remain where he was. It so happened that at the time there was another resident in that illustrious cat house that was in need of placement. He was young, but no longer a kitten. What set him apart was that he had an extra digit on all four paws. We named him for Ernest Hemingway, as the cats at Papa’s Key West home were known for being polydactyl. So Nesto signed on.

Darkness
Extended periods of darkness, longer and more profound than anyone not living in one of America’s great cities has ever known.
As power shuts

Darkness
Extended periods of darkness, longer and more profound than anyone not living in one of America’s great cities has ever known.
As power shuts down there is darkness and the sudden loss of electrical conveniences. As batteries lose power, there is more gradual failure of cell phones, portable radios, and flashlights.
Emergency generators provide pockets of light and power, but there is little running water anywhere…Emergency supplies of bottled water are too scarce to use for anything but drinking, and there is nowhere to replenish the supply. Disposal of human waste becomes an issue within days…. - this goes on quite a bit

There is scant consolation to be found in the fact that a major attack on the grid hasn’t happened yet. Modified attacks on government, banking, commercial, and infrastructure targets are already occurring daily, and while sufficient motive to take out an electric power grid may be lacking for the moment, capability is not.

A 2008 report predicts that only one in ten Americans would survive a year into a national blackout.

Q: How likely is an attack on our power grid?
Ted Koppel: Very. When I posed that question to former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, she put the likelihood at 80 or 90 percent. General Lloyd Austin, who currently heads up the U.S. military’s Central Command, told me that it’s not a question of “if, but of when.” Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned of a cyber Pearl Harbor, and President Obama highlighted the threat to our power grid in his 2013 State of the Union address. In short, government and military leaders think it’s likely, and I found no compelling evidence to the contrary. - From A Conversation with Ted Koppel - on his site for the book

Unlike any other kind of threat this country has ever faced, it can be very difficult tracking the source, the origin of a cyber attack. Given all of that you might assume that the government has formulated special plans to deal with the aftermath of such an attack. There are plans for hurricanes, and blizzards, and earthquakes, but this would be very different. The power outages caused by a targeted cyber attack would last longer and cover a much wider area than any of those natural disasters. So, is there a plan? No. - from Koppel’s video intro to the book, on his site

…as Mike McConnell [then director of national intelligence] said: ‘For the record, if we were attacked, we would lose.’

Russia...turned off the electric grid in part of Ukraine last December, mostly to show that they could.

Security experts point to evidence that a well-funded Russian hacking group, known as Energetic Bear, has been probing the networks of power grid operators and energy and oil companies in the United States, Europe and Canada. That could be exploration — or it could be preparation of the battle space in the event of a future conflict.

I’m a liar…born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist. As a maker of fictions,

I’m a liar…born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists.

…We all reinvent our pasts…but writers are in a class of their own. Even when they know the truth, it’s never enough for them.

These are true stories told from memory—to which you are entitled to ask, what is truth, and what is memory to a creative writer in what we may delicately call the evening of his life? To the lawyer, truth is facts unadorned. Whether such facts are ever findable is another matter. To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing. Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts, but in nuance.

I have met two former heads of the KGB in my life and I liked them both.

In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, 330 people in the United States have been charged with some kind of jihadist terrorist crime ranging in s

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, 330 people in the United States have been charged with some kind of jihadist terrorist crime ranging in seriousness from murder to sending small sums of money to a terrorist group. An astonishing four out of five of them are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.

…flies in the face of the conventional belief (largely attributable to the fact that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by nineteen foreign-born Arab hijackers) that those involved in terrorist activity in the United States are foreigners. In fact, the overwhelming number of those engaged in jihadist crimes in the States have been Americans. Moreover, more than one hundred American citizens or residents have been charged after traveling overseas to join a terrorist group, and a further thirty-nine were arrested in the States while planning to do so.

Since 2001 forty-five Americans have been killed by jihadist terrorists in the United States. In that same period, by contrast, forty-eight Americans have been killed in acts of political violence by far-right extremists.(1)

…in the name of defeating Islamic terrorism, since 9/11 the FBI has instigated more jihadist terrorist “plots” in the States than al-Qaeda or any of its affiliated groups—thirty versus ten.

…technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to

…technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to dating (Tinder). One industry after another is simply knocked out via venture-backed entrepreneurial daring and hastily shipped software. Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept, and their numbers only grow in time. With the explosion of venture capital, there is no shortage of bananas to feed them. The question for society is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost.

mostly failed scientists like me who had sold out to the man and suddenly found themselves, after making it through years of advanced relativity and quantum mechanics, with a golf-club-wielding gorilla called a trader peering over their shoulder asking them where their risk report was. We were quantitative enablers, offering the new and shiny blessings of modern computation to the old business of buying and selling… quants were the eunuchs at the orgy. The fluffers on the porn set of high finance. We were the ever-present British guy in every Hollywood World War II film: there to add a touch of class and exotic sophistication, but not really consequential to the plot (except perhaps to conveniently take some bad guy’s bullet.)

anyone who claims the Valley is meritocratic is someone who has profited vastly from it via nonmeritocratic means like happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort, or some concealed act of skullduggery. Since fortune had never been on my side, and I had no privileged cohort to fall back on, skullduggery it would have to be.

There are worse ways of monetizing sociopathy than startups. If you know any better ways, I’m listening.

The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light:

The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.

I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

When White writes about his love for the countryside, at heart he is writing about a hope that he might be able to love himself. But the countryside wasn’t just something that was safe for White to love it was a love that was safe to write about. It took me a long time to realize how many of our classical books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

In this bloody scene, one man escaped White’s revulsion: the huntsman, a red-faced, grave and gentlemanly figure who stood by the hounds and blew the mort on his hunting horn, the formal act of parting to commemorate the death of the fox. By some strange alchemy—his closeness to the pack, his expert command of them—the huntsman was not horrible. For White it was a moral magic trick, a way out of his conundrum. By skillfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself.

I saw those nineteenth century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the male qualities they thought threatened by modern life; wildness, power, virility, independence, and strength. By identifying with their hawks as they trained them, they could introject, or repossess, those qualities. At the same time they could exercise their power by ‘civilising’ a wild and primitive creature. Masculinity and conquest; two imperial myths for the price of one.

The bare field we’d flown the hawk upon is covered in gossamer, millions of shining threads combed downwind across every inch of soil. Lit by the sinking sun the quivering silk runs like light on water all the way to my feet. It is a thing of unearthly beauty, the work of a million tiny spiders searching for new homes. Each had spun a charged silken thread out into the air to pull it from its hatch-place, ascending like intrepid hot-air balloonists to drift and disperse and fall.

"The way I see it our son got into Harvard, Duke, and Penn. He has a job. He is relevant to the world. I only hope my life can be as relevant." - from the Philly.com article

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

I write to find out what I think about something. I wrote American Gods because I had lived in America for almost a decade and felt it was time that I learned what I thought about it. I wrote Coraline because, when I was a child, I used to wonder what would happen if I went home and my parents had moved away without telling me.

Memory scientists often speak of the important difference between knowing that a certain fact is true and knowing how you came to learn it. For example, here’s a simple question: What’s the capital of France? The answer probably leapt to your mind in an instant. Now, here’s another question: When did you learn that Paris is the capital of France? If you’re like most people, you have no idea. That particular fact twinkles in your mind amid an enormous constellation of other facts, most of them forever disconnected from the moment they first sprang to life. The store of mostly disconnected facts is known as your semantic memory.

Your semantic memory is contrasted with your episodic memory, which is your memory of fleshed-out narratives rather than merely facts. When you engage your episodic memory, you engage in a form of mental time travel, bringing yourself back to a particular place and time, reimagining a scene you’ve already lived. When you engage your semantic memory you are doing the mental equivalent of flipping through an encyclopedia or photo album, plucking out bits of information whose origins might be unclear.