Today's MOMENT OF ZEN 1/10/13

Words and photo by F LoBuono

This excerpt is from an interview conducted with the author, George Saunders, by Joel Lovell and was published in The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, 1/6/13.

 I'd been kind of an Ayn Rand guy before that, he said. And then you go to Asia and you see people who are genuinely poor and genuinely suffering and hadn't gotten there by whining. While on a break in Singapore, walking back to his hotel in the middle of the night, he stopped by an excavation site and saw these shadows scuttling around in the hole. And then I realized the shadows where old women, working the night shift. Oh,  I thought, Ayn Rand doesn't account for this.