To fix Social Security, we should first stop using the Consumer Price Index to adjust benefits for inflation. Using the C.P.I. overstates the impact of inflation and has also led to larger increases in benefits for Social Security recipients than the...
When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their ...
Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from h...
Like many a Yank before me, I have tried to explain to European friends that Americans actually know soccer quite well, that many of us played it in school and college, but that, well, we just don't find it quite as exciting as, say, what we call foo...
Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in...
As a man who tried to explain in his own way that people have to learn to get along with each other. I did it with comedy because that's what I'm familiar with, and I think it's more acceptable to tell it in comedy form. But that's how I'd like to be...
If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, or how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people." "And a lot fewer poems and plays," I said, laughing as I splashed about in the scent...
When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?
In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that...
If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It's not that people won't burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline - but certainly the number ...
Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-...
There are a whole lot of little tales told in 'Presumed Innocent,' whether it's about the Hobberly kid, who was an important witness who ends up assassinated, or an accountant named Marcy Lupino, who meets a horrible fate in a state penitentiary. The...
'Reversible Errors' is about the limits of the law to define who committed ultimate evil, to define what ultimate evil is, to allow the million arbitrary factors to make this a meaningful punishment, and finally to say, 'Are we really accomplishing w...
But I can no longer ready any faith's Napoleonic saber rattling without picturing smoking rubble on cable news. I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he woul...
My wife is very interested in fashion. I am absolutely not. I couldn't give a toss. Fashion is a perfectly valid thing to be interested in. I'm just not particularly interested in pop culture. I think I am more interested in things that have a settle...
In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow - and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.
We fill our lives with all sorts of things that make it easier for us to get along in the world: wheelchairs, crutches, grabber sticks, hearing aids, canes, guide dogs, modified vehicles, ramps, as well as other kinds of services and supports. Disabi...
For Sarah Palin, the least experienced on the world stage, the stress of maintaining the fiction that she was qualified to be vice president sent her over the deep end almost immediately. She went off on a ferocious spending spree that might have kil...
Prince William's smiling hostility toward the press is his non-negotiable core value. I am told he is so protective of his privacy he has been known to plant false tips with friends he distrusts and watch the media to see if they play out.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the Obamacare tech nightmare is how wholly predictable it all was. Anyone who has been involved in building the most rudimentary of web operations knows nothing ever works as it's supposed to. Even awesome Apple, m...
Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides...
