When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.

The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.

Your hair isn't quite right and maybe you're a size bigger than you should be and on and on and on. I think there comes a moment when you've matured to the point where you suddenly think, nonsense. I am fine just the way I am.

There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and their peers play such a huge role in their lives. If you offer independence, there is one kind of pitfall; if you shelter them too much, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

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.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.