Obama’s DHS has so far deported more people than during the first six and a half years of George W. Bush’s administration. Just shy of 1.5 million unauthorized immigrants have been forcefully deported from the United States under [Janet] Napolitano’s leadership. These annual deportation figures are higher that at any other time in U.S. history, pushing the backlog for deportation cases to a record 314,147 this June. The government is apprehending unauthorized immigration so quickly that it cannot effectively process them all.

Every life has great meaning, but the meaning of our own can often be obscured by the fog of constant activity and plain bad habits…. Doing less leads to more love, more effectiveness and internal calmness, and a greater ability to accomplish more of what matters most — to us, and by extension to others in the world.

You can also create luck in any given spot: You turn your head to the opposing row of books. A different subject area can arise, perhaps only partly to do with your areas of interest. This is non-link-based browsing. You can discover, instead of being endlessly sought.

Rumpus: And Alan’s got bad credit. Eggers: Yeah, there’s the tyrannical rule of credit reports, which is really one of the more comically absurd elements of Alan’s life and modern life. These credit agencies wield incredible and absolute power, but their methods are highly questionable and often illogical. But whatever random score they post next to Alan’s name determines his fate for home ownership, loans, everything. It’s a terrifying, Orwellian thing that we came up with ourselves and we obey without question. I mean, a mysterious algorithm concocted by shadowy companies with no accountability or transparency that produces a single all-powerful number that no one questions but determines your economic fate? It’s maniacal.

As for me, in matters of the soul, I’m a devout agnostic. What astounds me, what has always astounded me, is not that so many people are so certain of their beliefs but that they excoriate people who don’t share them. As a child, I repented for my doubt. Now I embrace it. Religious dogma is not verifiable; science is fallible. Uncertainty is the only belief system I feel sure of.

America has always been able to attract the most ambitious people who are determined to have a better life. If we ever lose that and start to believe that somehow that it is instead a threat to us to have those people come here, we are going to lose one of the strongest elements of not just our national wealth, but of our national soul.