All of life is a wager

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

Friends call me Hitch. Maybe it can be turned into a 900-phone number. People would pay to talk to me.

Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

What I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, is that you can't be apolitical. It will come and get you. It's not that you shouldn't be neutral. It's that you won't be able to stay neutral.

Redemption is promised at the low price of surrender of your critical faculties.