I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

When something really comes from the soul, I think it has a truth that you cannot find in politics.

Someday we'll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation.

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those 'good Germans' who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.

The only truly shocking thing about last Tuesday's election is that the Democrats didn't do far worse, or as badly as they deserved.

There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.