The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.

Superstition? Who can define the boundary line between the superstition of yesterday and the scientific fact of tomorrow?

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What's hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it.

Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.