With a novel, you have the reader with you a lot longer, and you owe him a lot more. Obviously you have to have a plot - I say "obviously," although I think a lot of fiction doesn't, and nothing seems to happen. But to me, there should be something that happens, and it should be at least vaguely plausible. And because the readers are going to be with these characters for a long time, you have to get to know them and like them and want to know what happens to them.

U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation's continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor kinves, and pepper spray on fourteen commerical flights without getting caught. Then ABC News reports that it smuggled fifteen pounds of uranium into New York City. Then Fox News reports that it flew Osama bin Laden to Washington, D.C., and videotaped him touring the White House.

The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste?

Another foreign-policy triumph for Reagan was his 1984 visit to China, where he met for more than three hours with Mao Zedong before realizing that Mao was dead.

The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.

This ball was so crowded that it took me - a trained professional journalist with vast experience in this area - forty five minutes to get a beer.

Congress is thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists broadcast signals to Alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien beings have atomic blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their federal programs as if they were merely poor people.