After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they,...
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order...
Travis Alexander was a good guy. Was he a saint? No. But he was somebody who was really, really invested in helping other people and making this world a better place. Everything he did, even the car he drove, was a sign of him trying to be a force fo...
My parents came to this country after World War II, Jews from Czechoslovakia who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. They settled with my sister in rural Ohio in the 1950s, where my dad became the town doctor and I was born.
The only gift my dad ever bought me is still in my jewelry box. It died at 10 minutes to 11 decades ago, but the gold Caravelle watch keeps my dad alive. A watch isn't about keeping time. It's about stopping it.
If you think of life and death on a continuum, finding the point where it tips is complicated. It cuts across all political lines and gets to the root of our humanity. It requires faith informed by years of intimacy that you're doing what's right for...
Some people hate funerals. I find them comforting. They hit the pause button on life and remind us that it has an end. Every eulogy reminds me to deepen my dash, that place on the tombstone between our birth and our death.
If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.
Once you come up with a premise, you have to work out how it all happened. It's a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure.
Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of con...
People ask me 'Why you want to do another magazine - 10 years at 'Vogue,' a great magazine? Why do you want to make a new one? It's so difficult and there's already so many.' I wanted to do something new, bring a new vision.
There are a lot of people in Congress who would never have made a great career or fortune in any other profession. But after they spend a while hanging out with the rich guys, they begin to feel they've been undervalued, and that an eventual seven-fi...
We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged.
The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems ...
If anything, Brown is more oriented towards the other side of the Atlantic than Blair. Most of his reforming ideas and intellectual influences seem to come from the United States, and in a recent speech he went to great lengths to emphasise the histo...
There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.
Even if you have nothing in your wallet, nothing can keep you from having a great summer. You can listen to crickets sing you to sleep, trace the Big Dipper, breathe in the stars, run through a sprinkler, host a cartwheel contest in the front yard.
China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one...
My parents were just constantly affirming me in everything that I did. Late at night, I'd wake up and hear my mother talking over my bed, saying, 'You're going to do great on this test. You can do anything you want.'
I tend to relate more to people on television who are just themselves, for good or for bad, than I do to someone who I believe is putting on some sort of persona. The anchorman on 'The Simpsons' is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that...
When I was in my 20s, I wanted to be tough. I discovered that I didn't want to be the woman I was raised to be - a good, traditional wife. When I went out in the world to find a husband, I found that husbands weren't ready to accept the kind of woman...
