I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.

Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

I think Americans suspect, without even being able to articulate it, that we're at the end of the American century; that we're at the end of the 100 or 125 or 150 years when we were the undisputed arbiter and leader of the world.

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.