Playground

by Richard Powers

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting. The perfect story to tell such a dark and anxious child.

The fate of continents is written in water.

If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

While his former classmates accused him of uppity betrayal, Rafi Young boarded a yellow bus with stiff red upright seats that took him for an hour-and-a-half ride into enemy territory way on the other side of Chicago’s great checkerboard, to serve time as the only black kid in Green Classical.

soon enough he was everybody’s fetish.

His life as a permanent infiltrator had begun.

Maybe it’s cheating that my favorite spot contains so many others.

Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.

“Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!” “Meaning?” “Put on your little beanie cap and don’t release the potato.” Bart Mannis laughed so hard he almost ran them off the highway. But the meaning was clear, wasn’t it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides.

Another reporter took up the attack. “Some people say that women at sea bring bad luck.” “Some women say that some journalists’ bait might not be worth taking!”

“Put the beanie on. Do not release the potato.” “Don’t release the potato.” “Never release the potato.”

A clan had spread across a third of the globe a thousand years and more before the West’s most advanced ships managed a single crossing.

Evelyne simply hoped that the girl might live long enough to grow as forgetful as she needed to be.

Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

everything that people found of interest interested her.

“We know everything, don’t we, sister? The two of us? People who are about to die know everything.” The Canadian was not rattled. Palila had yet to rattle her, despite several tries. “Peut-être,” Madame Beaulieu said. Perhaps. “But I wouldn’t mind learning just a little bit more.”

Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick.

‘Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.’ John Lennon.”

he knew he would never again think of letting go of the potato. Everything came from the potato. Without the potato, life would be far bleaker.

“It’s quite cool, really. For nine months, I will be the host of a sea creature!”

Never again in life would he let perfect be the enemy of good. He had lived that way once, and it almost cost him everything.

“Is a thing still garbage, once life starts using it?”

my generation of islanders are wandering around on the beach in a daze, concussed by history.”

First: I am working to revise some early lessons. Second: That takes a lot of drafts. Fortunately, I do enjoy keeping the game going.”

Find the moves that the rules forgot to outlaw.

the strength of a man’s character was measured by how much he was willing to lose on others’ behalf.

Do not blame your fear of life on me.”

This is not your doing.” “Perhaps not. But it will be my undoing.” “Not at all.” Her voice suggested: It might be the making of you.

The claim was met by collective doubt, but also by something like doubt’s more sanguine little brother, curiosity.

To know someone was to have power over them, and my deep learning algorithms were starting to know our users in ways no human could.

it made perfect sense to me that the machines that would doom us cut their teeth by watching humans play.

‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.’ ” Evie frowned. “Clearly It Is Ocean? That’s my title?” “Clearly.”

The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.

I watched a mother sea otter wrap her daughter in kelp before she dove down to find clams and urchins for dinner. The scientist in me was amazed. But the mother in me just thought: Of course. She wants to keep her young one warm and safe. She wants to make sure that her child doesn’t float away while she hunts for their dinner beneath the waves.

She wrote of swimming at night in the black, warm water of the South China Sea, when every paddle of her limbs triggered a swirling Milky Way of animals flashing blue and white. Three-quarters of ocean species, from zooplankton to giant squid, were signaling in a language of living light.

She strove to enchant her own children. For Daniel, she turned reefs into cities, salt marshes into suburbs, and kelp forests, seagrass meadows, estuaries, lagoons, and even the open ocean into habitats of interlocking design so intricate they would leave even the most brilliant civil engineer mute with awe. For Dora, she cast the oceans as the craziest imaginable fantasy populated with wild monsters and wilder heroes.

The shrimp is a great digger but is almost blind. The goby stands watch outside their shared burrow, catching food for them both. The shrimp constantly feels for the fish with long antennae. The goby tells the shrimp what is happening outside, using a language of special fin flicks. At the first sign of danger, the goby whisks them both back into the fortress that the shrimp has built.

I will tell you honestly: Like everyone, I thought that the ocean was infinite and could not be harmed. I was wrong. The waters are warming. The large fish are disappearing. Plastics and metals and poisons are concentrating all the way up the food chain. And worse is yet to come. . . . Without your love, the ocean will die.

Administration. Washington. Trapped in a terrestrial life, among bickering humans. The brutal penalties of success were now complete.

In the back of Evie’s mind was the hope that when Washington and Dr. Earle let her go, she might still be able to return home, make friends with these exotic new grown-ups, and learn the secrets of their land-based confidence.

He turned to look at the woman at his side. He saw the longing in her gaze. “My goby,” he said. She blinked at the bizarre endearment. Then she understood. “My shrimp,” she answered.

Great bursts of color were coursing through her, a symphony of inexplicable, contradictory messages about nothing and everything. Your sea is so great and our craft so small, O Lord. The cuttlefish’s song.

She shrugged, and I wanted a different attorney.

as far as she could make out, the seasteaders’ calls for freedom were simply greed relabeled.

She had voted her whole life. And all her local victories had merely transferred the latest defeat into someone else’s country.

How hard it was, how painful, to be grateful for everything.

The child claps his hands in joy. “We got one! He’s ours!” As if all the dangers that threaten the island have just been turned into tomorrow’s dinner.

For centuries, the island has always hung flowers around the necks of its destroyers.

The man who has come here to steal their way of life needs help.

This strange island is my afterlife, and those two children are my sun and moon. I still make art, which will always be my stars.