She looked at me for a second and said, "Oh, never mind. I guess it's true what Mom said? That you've led a sheltered life?"

I said I thought the description fairly apt.

My childhood was very sheltered. I grew up in a palace. But I lived in Morocco as a Moroccan citizen.

He turned one of his death rays into an ice cream maker, except he said I shouldn’t eat too much of it at once.”

I nodded slowly. “Right,” I said. “That’s…sweet, I think.

Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I'd never considered before.

Would you agree," he said, "that man's sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible?"

"Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain." My father crossed his arms. "And only if one man's pleasure is as important as any other's.

He said that academia reminded him of a badly run circus. The faculty members were like underfed animals -- weary of their cages, which were never large enough to begin with -- and they responded sluggishly to the whip. The trapeze artists fell with monotonous regularity into poorly strung nets. The clowns looked hungry. The tent leaked. The crowd was inattentive, shouting incoherently at inappropriate moments. And when the show was over, no one cheered.