It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer. Ions might charge the air but they fell flat when it came to charging the imagination - my imagination, anyway.

I started writing one afternoon when I was twenty, and ever since then I have written every day. At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my identity, and I did it without thinking.

At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.

I tend to show everything I do to my family, to check they won't be offended.

It didn't seem fair to me that Jon Stewart's rally didn't get the same kind of attention that Glenn Beck's did. Why was Beck's seen as checking the thermometer of the country, and Jon Stewart just dismissed as a satirist?

Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.