This is the moment when I should also admit that when the Internet first arrived I kept telling people it was a fad.

I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with politicians who've done something morally reprehensible but not indictable, yet still think they should be able to stay in office. The office isn't a right. It's a kind of loan.

One very clear memory I have of college is that I never learned anything in the big lectures. I have a feeling I'd have done even worse if they'd been on a laptop screen.

Billy Jean King could not get credit when her husband was in law school and she was winning the Wimbledon, because he had to sign the cards. You know, you had these cases in the '70s of women who were mayors who couldn't get credit unless their husbands signed for them.

When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.

The middle of 'America's Women' is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.

Phil Gramm had a stump speech about how his mother's devotion kept him from being an academic failure in life. She got him into a special school that turned him around - under a government program for the children of deceased veterans. He was repeatedly asked at press conferences why he would then turn around and support draconian cuts in federal funding for education. He never had an answer.