There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them -- a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants -- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein.

I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless.

A new volume asks, ‘Is the old man back again?’