Acceptance speeches can make or break presidential candidacies. It was Al Gore's 2000 acceptance speech that relaunched his candidacy and nearly saved him. John Kerry's speech and overall ineffective convention nearly sank him in 2004 (though he was ...
One of the more bizarre games I played as a kid was something called 'kill the man.' It was a cross between football and rugby, which found the person carrying the ball a target of some hungry tacklers. I still don't know why we enjoyed the game beca...
It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.
I am such a do-goody, people-pleasing kid - or I was - I don't think I've ever been fired, not even from an ice cream shop, magician for kids' parties, not even in my early jobs in radio.
The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful...
I'm trying to make perfect moments. And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works - to what we are as a species, how we've come up with telling stories in scenes and images.
There is a kind of structure for a story that was peculiarly compelling for the radio. I thought I had invented it atom-by-atom sitting in an editing booth in Washington on M Street when I was in my 20s. Then I found out that it is one of the oldest ...
There are surely times when a conservative and a liberal would agree. We would agree on how moral it is to discriminate on the basis of race. There's absolutely no light between those two positions. It becomes a little more complex when you talk abou...
…if you have someone who wants to heal, sometime they will respond to the unconventional. Their minds are more open to healing, so their bodies become more willing too. I believe that medication, while a wonderful thing, has its limits. That there ...
A lot of comics aren't their on-screen personas; Chris Rock isn't always ranting and raving. What I do is make myself this over-the-top character that people either find endearing or they think is a joke. Then I can do anything I want.
It’s true, though, others won’t understand me. I know that. I’m still an alien in the American Christian subculture. Each evening I retreat from it, and I go straight to the Gospels. It's not out of duty that I read about Jesus; it's a respite.
Now then, let's come right down in here and put some nice big strong arms on these trees. Tree needs an arm too. It'll hold up the weight of the forest. Little bird has to have a place to set there. There he goes...
Mix up a little more shadow color here, then we can put us a little shadow right in there. See how you can move things around? You have unlimited power on this canvas -- can literally, literally move mountains
Selective Biblical quotation is a favorite of leftists who interpret the Bible the same way they do the Constitution: as a Chinese menu designed to allow picking and choosing. That's because when many Democrats take the Bible as a whole, they realize...
If the United States had maintained its spending under Ronald Reagan, it is possible that the attacks of 9/11 - presaged by Islamic terror attacks on multiple American targets beginning with the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 - would...
Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioa...
Obama wants to raise the issue of immigration reform so that he can demonize Republicans as anti-Hispanic. That's why Obama ignores the broad support for an immigration plan that would provide border security once and for all and then deal with the i...
Few Americans have ever met their Congresspeople. They don't see them at the grocery store; they don't meet them at the bowling alley. They're more likely to see their representatives in photographs from the Daily Grill in Washington, D.C., than at a...
The Muslim world just doesn't believe that skin color is all that important. Obama may be half-black, but he's still all-Western, according to them. It doesn't matter whether you're black, white or green - if you're not a devotee of Muhammad, you don...
While the West tries to turn its civilization into cultural variety hour, Islam tries to turn Muslim lands into a cultural monolith. The same West that justifies the rap culture thinks that every Muslim terrorist bombing is an expression of economic ...
Technically, web browsers can control what users see, and sites using Javascript can overwrite anything coming from the original authors. Browsers heavily utilize Javascript to create an interactive Internet; sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail c...
