I think politics is everything.

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.

When Trump says fake news, he means journalism that makes points with which he disagrees, usually about him.

Peggy Noonan is not as good a columnist as my colleague Kathleen Parker, in my opinion, but they share something related to their Pulitzers. Kathleen won in in 2010. They won it for a similar reason. They broke from their crowd, and sprinted away. They delivered the politically unexpected take, at some peril to their readership.

I think Marco Rubio could never have recovered from revealing himself to be pathetic.

On Twitter, people like me regularly get called "sore losers" by Trumpeters. It just makes me roll my eyes. This is not about winning and losing. We all lost, even them, they just don't know it yet.

It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain - from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.