cycling, soccer, literature, progressive politics
Anyone who isn't a fool; and a fool, to me, is anyone who takes pride in his or her ignorance.
Native Son; 1984; The Fountainhead; The God of Small Things; The Grapes of Wrath; (Anything by Steinbeck); One Hundred Years of Solitude; Crime and Punishment; and while I'm at it, I may as well name my own books: Intimate Relations with Strangers,How to Kill Your Boyfriend in (Ten Easy Steps), God in the Image of Woman, The Last Dream Before Dawn (AKA God's Bastard Sons) and The Raw Essentials of Human Sexuality
I don't really have heroes: I think you damn people when you start giving their extraordinary feats a quasai-supernatural, unreal, can-do-no-wrong, gauze. The more you make someone your hero, the more in-human they must become -- since human beings are rarely as perfect and unselfish, etc. as we view our heroes to be. On the other hand, there are people I admire for their actions and philosophical consistency, such as Nelson Mandela, Richard Wright and John Steinbeck (and a practically inexhaustible list of people). Similarly, I'm greatful to a whole host of people who I don't know, and never will. This is so because I believe the tapestry of human existence is beyond both you and me and what we think we know.