what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.

When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.

More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.

I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.

It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.