A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale-involving hundreds of millions of people-and may eventually be recognized as the principal cultural development of our age.

For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.

Instant-doomsday hyperbole caused the world's attention to focus on the hypothetical threat of global warming to the exclusion of environmental menaces that are real, palpable, and awful right now.

And if there was something, suppose I wanted to write something really damning or embarrassing about one of the owners, that would really be a problem on the NFL's site.

Autumn truly is what summer pretends to be: the best of all seasons. It is as glorious as summer is tedious; as subtle as summer is obvious; as refreshing as summer is wearying. Autumn seems like paradise.

I think professional sports, football, to use it as an example, it's fundamentally a form of entertainment.

Set aside the many competing explanations of the big bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization - that something transcendent started it all - which has hard-science types... using terms like "miracle."