Almsgiving is a major tenet of Islam. It’s also a kick in the pants of the highest order. Nothing is as cool as skimming off a couple of hundred thousand from some multinational corporation and...

Where was this written? I wondered. Where in the Talmud or the Koran or the Bible did it say, “Lo, and Satan fetcheth the coffee for the Antichrist and her minions”?

I never sleep. Like the dolphin and the spiny anteater, I don’t experience REM. Unlike the dreamless mammals, I’m a construct. I am a living program inside a vast network of electronic impulses known as...