Andy Stasiuk was a newsman of the old school of front-page journalism - tough, knowledgeable, cynical, single-minded and fun. He covered the news as a happy warrior in an era of cutthroat editorial competition.
Gail didn't want me commenting on the opinion pages. I was hired by the news department and, despite the rabid assertions of the Times' enemies and detractors, the two really have nothing to do with each other.
There is only so much you can do if you're pulling weight and there's nobody there to play off of. You can't have those beautiful moments with new actors who are so worried about everything else but the moment.
From the streets of Cairo and the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, from the busy political calendar to the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, social media was not only sharing the news but driving it.
The exciting new thing, call it Internet.2, would be where links were updated and moved depending on where people click. That would give you the kind of content screening that you don't get at the moment.
At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.
Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the 'demands' of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.
Love it when a compelling new character kicks open your mental door, tracks mud across your brain, and props their feet up on your cerebrum.
If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating.
When you do a play, or even a movie, you have weeks to finesse your character. You really understand why they do what they do. In TV, you get new material weekly about your character.
I haven't really been recording in the last several years. I haven't wanted to. And even though I had to deal with Sony and now I'm on Universal again, I will probably put out a new record soon.
A friend of mine called and said they're interested in having you do a song for the new Pokemon. All my kids are grown up, so I'd heard of it, but I didn't really know what it was.
I feel traveling certainly does broaden the mind. In my case certainly I feel more confident. It gives you a new perspective on the world.
I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they've ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn't know, because I won't ever dare ask that question.
I didn't do anything but sit quietly and pay attention to the fact that my hollow chest was still beating. I was still alive and could see that the new normal wasn't so bad.
But particularly when the media profess to strive toward objectivity, gatekeepers play a crucial role in helping people navigate the news to make educated political decisions.
I would listen to how they told the story, to what elements they used, to how it sounded, and that's who I patterned myself after, the people who were on CBS News.
Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.
The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
The summer of 1830 I... blasted the tunnel through the rock to take water from the dam above the falls for the mill... In 1831 we lowered the tunnel four feet, and built a new dam across the creek.
You can never go back to a specific moment. That's why it's important to live in the present and not the past. Don't let foolish memories get in the way of the makings of new ones.
