Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.

Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from - dare I say it - God.

We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.

Only institutions that go about the old-fashioned business of taking in deposits from customer A and lending them out to customer B should be called banks. The rest should call themselves what they are. 'Parlors' would be appropriate, or 'dens' - words more suitable to venerable betting pursuits.

In 2004, I wrote 'What We've Lost,' a book about the Bush administration. It sold only reasonably well, in part, I think, because the book was a horrific downer, an unrelenting account of the administration's actions, bungles, deceptions, half-truths, untruths, and downright corruptions.

It's no surprise that the Bush administration's bullying swagger and blithe ignorance have caused much of the Muslim world to hold the U.S. in rock-bottom regard.

Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.