Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production - only to produce a race of bed-wetters!

Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death.

What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.

When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don't expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don't want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.