I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
The bicycle is a former child's toy that has now been elevated to icon status because, presumably, it can move the human form from pillar to post without damage to the environment.
I'm a vegetarian who doesn't like eggplant parmesan. Isn't that awful? I'm also sick of portobello mushrooms. People are like, 'A vegetarian's coming to dinner,' so they serve those.
I'm not a princess. My mother is, not I. I am the niece of a head of state. And with this status, I have some representational duties - nothing very constraining or very exceptional.
George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'.
Only recently - about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy - have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that 'as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.'
In 1976, Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that - somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.
Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.
Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid, I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like, see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down.
Many of us are under the delusion that the police exist solely to deal with crime and keep us safe. That is to ignore the major focus of many of today's top cops on managing reputation - both of their force and, by default, their careers.
When Americans invade Iraq, Bush says, we will be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people, proving that taking out Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.
Remember the picture of the president in the classroom, being told of the attack by chief of staff Andy Card? The American people thought they were seeing a man suddenly thrust into a grave challenge no one could have anticipated.
I have a horrible sweet tooth. It's gotten to the point where if I throw a cookie in the garbage, I have to douse it in Cascade. Otherwise, why wouldn't I take it out and eat it?
I run in Central Park as the sun comes up. Some may mistake it for walking, but I swear I am running. I could not do it without my iPod.
A man with no children can easily be lulled into a sense that time is standing still. It's not. It's marching past us, relentlessly. Having a child growing and changing before your eyes makes this unavoidably clear.
But there have been many news reports that water-boarding has been used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the major al Qaeda figures that we have in U.S. custody.
I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark.
So, it, of course, makes one wonder how many other people there might be who are completely innocent, who have been sent by the U.S. to countries where they've been interrogated, and in some instances it seems tortured.
The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.
Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wounds. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly.
[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into i...
