A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We've turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it's much easier to access a person's location than it is to ask - or to trust.

I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.

But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.

Then he got more books. He saved all the books.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?