The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mo...
I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we l...
As the wonderful agony begins for 1964-65, I sometimes wonder why I do it. I've got an insurance business going on the side, and it is starting to grow nicely. Selling insurance fulfills me, in a way, like basketball. But basketball keeps calling me ...
When you head on out to the Moon, in very short order, and you get a chance to look back at the Earth, that horizon slowly curves around in upon himself, and all of sudden you're looking at something that is very strange, but yet is very, very famili...
Here's the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family, which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. He...
In my books the technology that I choose to talk about has to serve the themes. What that means is that I end up having to cut out a lot of cool technology that would be really fun to describe and play with, but which would just confuse everybody. So...
The gospel of the Savior is not simply about avoiding bad in our lives; it also is essentially about doing and becoming good. And the Atonement provides help for us to overcome and avoid bad and to do and become good. Help from the Savior is availabl...
The scriptures were one of the ways God spoke to me - even when I was a child - about my needs, my situation, and my life. They still are. Since our needs change over a lifetime, God has different things to tell us at different times.
Changing anything in the past, if you believe it's possible, could alter the entire future of the world, including my own birth, so I'd change nothing. Not a thing. As for the future... I think I'd like to see how it all ends, which is probably why I...
Man, I'm 31 years old and a husband with four kids; I hope I'm no thug. I hear all those negative things and don't hear anything positive. I think that's all those people feel... that way that's all they hear about when you hear Allen Iverson did som...
For me, I always think about keeping my upper body relaxed, my hips level, and my right side down on the turn. If I work on nailing those three things at every practice, I hope that by the time I get into a race situation I can stay completely focuse...
At the end of the day, customer choice is essential. And we don't make products that compete with Apple, nor make products that compete with Google. Our customers come in both iOS and Android flavors, and I hope our customers can still buy the produc...
We are spirit children of a loving Heavenly Father who placed us in mortality to see if we would choose - freely choose - to keep His commandments and come unto His Beloved Son. They do not compel us. They cannot, for that would interfere with the pl...
Frankly, it's depressing, each night sleeping in someone else's home. I miss having a roof to my name. Our situation isn't an 'All in the Family' cliche, but it's still easy to see reality in plain terms: I live with my in-laws, and I can't say when ...
Education used to be a slice of life, something you did as a child through college, and then spent the rest of your life working, and then death. Everything is about to change. I believe education will become something that fits seamlessly into life,...
As smartphones have allowed us to have our computers, emails, social media feeds, and a full surveillance system in our pockets at all times, stories of the law enforcement's unease with that have been popping up in the press. And of course, the ones...
Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very, very good. Spending $1,000 for a ham sandwich would feel very, very bad. Spending $19,000 for a small family car would feel, well, more or less right. But as with physical pain, fiscal pain can depen...
I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against.
Throughout my college years, I'd watch my sister squeal every Christmas as she unwrapped another 'Buffy' DVD set. I didn't know much about the series, but I was filled with that obnoxious self-importance that comes from having decided to be an Academ...
I was 23 when I learned how to cook; I grew up around the same time. It was precisely then that Thanksgiving started to mean something more. Growing up, Christmas was always about me, and eventually you, when I finally started to enjoy the giving par...
Kind 'Guardian' readers have been forwarding me round robin Christmas newsletters for years now: lengthy missives full of perfect children, exotic holidays, talented pets and endless, tedious detail. The notes that accompanied them revealed they had ...
