Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.

The Cairo conferenceis about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.

You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.

The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.

We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.