Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.