The vitamin has been reified. A chemical intangible originally defined as a unit of nutritive value, it was long ago reified into a pill. Now it is a pill; no one except a few precise scientists define it as anything else. Once the vitamin became a pill, it became real according to the precepts of American Cartesianism: I swallow it, therefore it is.

There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America.

The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.

I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmoth.