When I was nine years old, I wrote a short story called 'How to Build a Snowman,' from which no practical snowperson-crafting techniques could be gleaned. The story was an assignment for class and it featured a series of careful but meaningless instr...
He said that doubt provided contour to faith, like shading in a drawing, that it allowed you to see what was really there. At the time we were learning how to sketch in art class, I felt like it was the one thing he said that I actually understood.
Following graduation from high school in 1948, I attended Harvard University where I became a physics major. Having grown up in a small town, I found Harvard to be an enormously enriching experience. Students in my class came from all walks of life a...
I do a one-hour workout called Drenched, a cardio-boxing fitness routine, Monday through Friday. There are usually between twenty-five and fifty people there - everyone from stay-at-home moms and professional martial artists to teenagers and seniors....
Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that'...
I meet people from really grand backgrounds who had horrible parents who took no interest in them, whereas I'm a working-class boy from Deptford who was worshipped by all my rellies. Everybody in my extended family helped to raise me, and I realise n...
I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a...
My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmo...
When girls feel bad about their looks, 60 percent avoid normal daily activities like raising their hand in class or even going to the doctor. That means that girls do not show up for life when they don't feel good enough or pretty enough. A role mode...
I think how veterans are treated in our country is an abomination. We don't have the draft any more, which is why so many soldiers come from working-class - rather than middle- or high-income families. Those wealthier families aren't affected, so the...
When I was driving home after registration, I heard this song on the radio, a guy singing about not ever going to class in college and always hanging out and singing for his friends. I laughed and said, I can relate, because it was so much like me. I...
One of my all-time favorite pranks was gaining unauthorized access to the telephone switch and changing the class of service of a fellow phone phreak. When he'd attempt to make a call from home, he'd get a message telling him to deposit a dime, becau...
The drama teacher that I had in high school, back in Texas, was the only teacher who didn't kick me out of his class. He turned me on to 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.' I had picked up Dylan with 'Bringing It All Back Home,' and he turned me on to the ...
I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve in...
As far as luxury goes, about the only thing I do is... I go first class all the way. I live on the road, so when I'm out there, I'm getting the nice hotel suite, I'm getting the luxury car, I'm eating the good food, and I make sure I take care of mys...
The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's al...
I'm very, very concerned ultimately, as Medicaid costs increase in my state and most states, it's going to reduce funding for state aid to our public schools, to our higher education institution or higher taxes on the middle class that President Obam...
Here in Indiana and in many states throughout the union, we rely on coal to power our homes and provide good-paying middle class jobs - like the one my family relied on when I was a kid. The coal mine helped put food on our table and helped me pursue...
See, that's why Barack's running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly - to build an economy that lifts every family, to make sure health care is available for every American - and to make sure that every child in this nation has a world-class educatio...
I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them recei...
At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm ...
