'Shabiha' is a difficult word to translate into English. It comes from the word Syrians used to describe the luxury Mercedes favored by the Assad family's operatives that the enforcers of the regime used to move money, smuggle weapons and intimidate ...
My father was a very good golfer and he got me started early. My grandfather played, too. It was just something that the Kroft family did. I kind of grew up on the golf course.
By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.' It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, go...
My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of govern...
Having to go through an intervention and family counseling is a wonderful experience. I would almost recommend it to anybody. It opens a lot of communication, and it opens old sores, but once it is opened and hashed out, the rewards are far greater.
I still think there's a big part of the population that has a lot of misinformation about sharks. But I think it's beginning to change a little bit. As good information about sharks permeates popular culture, things may start to change.
Climate change should not fundamentally be seen as a political or partisan issue, but it has been turned into a political football primarily by the climate deniers who have a vested interested in maintaining the status quo. That includes certain indu...
The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.
Republicans would have preferred the court overturn the health care bill, an act that would have underscored Obama's biggest liability - the perception among voters, including those who like and trust him, that he has been ineffective.
There's not a lot of other stuff I admire about his content, but there's something about Howard Stern and his perseverance in a very difficult industry. He does tickle me in certain ways with humor.
I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.
It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever.
My humor tends to be a little more edgy than is appropriate for 'Twilight,' although I got some in there. That was fun! There's just a tonal difference. For me, storytelling is storytelling. But, I do like writing for grown ups.
Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write. I become extremely pathetic, very sensational. Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words.
Whether it's viewers of the show or readers of my columns and books, I'm consistently impressed with their wit, humor and insight. That goes for about 95 percent of the audience. The other five percent are why the 'Delete' option and restraining orde...
Somebody says, 'Do a Tom Bodett, a folksy kind of thing,' and it sounds like something out of 'Hee Haw,' very insulting. They turn wry humor into disparaging sarcasm, and you get what amounts to insulting advertising.
If you look back in history of the women who are most memorable and most stylish, they were never the followers of fashion. They were the ones who were unique in their style, breakers of the rules. They were authentic, genuine, original. They were no...
My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.
I think he would have been proud and smiling... when we laid him to rest because his family was together. I think that was a great gift to be able to give Dad at the end.
The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you're the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains.
