After the collapse of Wall Street in the 1920s, the culture stopped being all about money, and the country survived and ultimately flourished.

Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure.

It's estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it's a distressing figure.

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.

Whatever age we are is the age we’ve always been.

It could fairly be said that America, during the Bush years, has entered an Age of Denial - arguably the first stage of a nation's decline.