All in all, I am not surprised that the people who want to unravel the social contract start with young adults. Those who are urged to feel afraid, very afraid, have both the greatest sense of independence and the most finely honed skepticism about government.

My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.

I suppose we make kids the repository of our highest ideals because children are powerless. In that way we can have ideals and ignore them at the same time.

We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.

We may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished the life he'd earned.