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.

I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing. They're a dying institution in many parts of the world because they refuse to ordain women or married people. And now they're a dying institution because some of their members did enormous harm to young people and instead of responding aggressively with humility, and with love, and with the confession of wrongdoing, they tried to spin it as though they were a political party, and that's just deplorable.

Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.

I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.

It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women's rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement.