That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper.... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.

The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you.

The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

However, there will be a Republican Party platform that will coalesce around their convention. Unless I miss my guess, it will be considerably more conservative on these issues, perhaps even than Governor Romney is, and I think that that will give Americans a clear set of choices about all issues, but about women's issues too.

I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.