I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.

Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a "teachable moment.

It's what the Taliban does in Afghanistan, it's what gets done in the Middle East, and it's clearly something that certain mainly conservative groups in the United States would like to do. They miss the good old days, when men were men and women were nothing.