To me it's very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American.

There are no totally generous acts. All "acts" have an element of calculation. One black ox slaughtered on Christmas does not wipe out a year of careful manipulation of gifts given to serve your own ends. After all, to kill an animal and share the meat with people is really no more than Ju/'hoansi do for each other every day and with far less fan fare.

What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided.

The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters.

Over and over again, cross-cultural research on infancy teaches the exact same lesson: infants can tolerate—and thrive under—care that most any Western parent would assume would end very badly.

And the reason we don't notice it is because that's the way we all cook - they cook like us, and, indeed, we cook like them'.

In my own eyes, I could only see how ridiculous I looked. How typical white-girl-goes-to-Africa. But in their eyes, the hair was a way to make me part of them, at least for a moment.

The Byzantines are logical and organized. They operate like a machine, like a catapult, for example. Everything works well when all steps take place as they should. But they are trained to follow rules, not to think for themselves. We, on the other hand, are good at improvising but lack control, we are, to a great extent, undisciplined, but have unity of Cause.

In addition, when they talked as if city people lived by different values, they were not emphasizing abortion, or gay marriage, or the things that are typically pointed to as the cultural issues that divide lower-income whites from the Democratic Party. Instead, the values they talked about were intertwined with economic concerns.

And as he dug, he wept. He saw Hari's animated face, and numberless dead men, and the hatred on the faces of the sepoys . . . and it suddenly seemed to him that he could see clearly the basis of all conflict and misery, something mysterious which grows in men at the same time as hair and teeth and brainsand which reveals its presence by the utter and atrocious inflexibility of all human habits and beliefs, even including his own.