Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.

I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

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.

I sort of feel like it comes around again. That when you get to a certain age, when you've lived enough and you've got your friends to support you and your family to support you, you wake up one morning and think, yeah, I'm okay.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.