Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Although I never publicly defended promiscuity, I never publicly attacked it. I attempted to avoid the subject, in part because I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.

What I love about the Internet and what I try to do on the issues is insist upon the ability to have bad taste if one wants.

I think sex is completely absurdly demonized in our culture. But in the end, however much sex you want to have, with however many people in how many ways, to be loved and to love is what human beings really want.

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.

Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.

The New York Times had not become The New York Times overnight. It had to earn its reputation day-by-day.