Fannie Mae is owned by shareholders but operates under a federal charter that exempts it from paying state or local taxes. As a result, many professional investors think the government would repay the debt that Fannie Mae had issued if the company co...
My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, slo...
Most of the people around me have a vested interest in how much money I make. You know, so a celebrity could find themselves in a position where people could have meetings about their life without them involved. And when I say 'their life' I mean not...
I feel like I was born to do this... I started working professionally as soon as I could, doing weddings and things like that in high school, while everyone else was having keg parties. I just felt destined to do it and really committed and driven; i...
Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped insid...
I have been working since I was 20, and I'm 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20's making $10,00...
Legal documents have mistrust written all over them. It's unfortunate, but the human DNA is so tuned to kind of taking you for granted that we tend to protect ourselves legally. That's why I don't read them as, if I read them, I will go soft. To me, ...
I kind of feel like I've been eating professionally for a long time. I've tasted everything. If there's a sausage, you know what? I know exactly what it tastes like. I love them all. But right now it's more important for me to not have all that greas...
We need not put our trust just in experts in settling on life choices or rank their recommendation unrivalled to our instinct. Professionalism is a name, an imprint, and most likely a "face". Many don't even have the right experience. They do commit ...
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with jou...
I always wanted to be a professional athlete, it just took me a while to realise it would be in racing. I played field hockey competitively for Ontario since I was 13, 14. Then I tried for the national side and made it. But it was so competitive. The...
During my years of professional cricket in England, I realised that although the Australians were talented players, tactically they were a bit naive when compared to those who played full-time on the English circuit. You might find this arrogant, but...
Liza considering back-peddling but thought about her empty bank account. “That’ll be fine, sir. I don’t wear skirts anyway.” He hmphed as though he suspected she might also be inclined to burn her bra on the courthouse steps and snapped, “N...
I am one of the most successful economists, according to what markets tell us, though most of my professional colleagues, who are much keener to accept market outcomes than I am, would dismiss me as a crank or - the worst of all abuses among economis...
You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: th...
.....and it is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes, those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by an ogreish professional hostess. These are...
When I started blogging in 2004, I responded to every comment no matter how nasty the reader was. I was generally polite, believing that these critics would be so charmed by my professionalism that they would see the error of their misogynist ways an...
Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a ...
Any game is important to me. At Boston College, when I went out for the spring games, I wanted to win. Maybe it is more important than other preseason games. It's just that everyone is expecting a lot from me in my first week of professional football...
The people I idolized I saw once a year on the Tony Awards. I would buy the cassette tapes of the various Broadway shows and scour the photos inside the recording package. That's how I exposed myself to the arts - New York and professional theater fe...
I acted professionally for about eight years, and I was writing all that time but never showed anybody any of it. There just came a point after those eight years when I thought, 'There's a lot I can do with acting - there are a lot of things I can ex...
