I've gotten thicker skin mostly from being older. You just stop caring quite as much about everything.

I think the local food movement has been taken to idiotic extremes. And so I wrote about that and people got pissed.

I can't imagine what someone would write that would infuriate me. Maybe if my loved one had died of some disease and someone was insensitive, that would piss me off.

You're not going to change anyone's mind. Especially online.

I think I realized that Dave Barry was funnier than I'll ever be, and he made no attempt to make any actual points. He had a general libertarian point of view, but in general, he just liked to make jokes.

When I get real big volumes of hate mail, it's usually because I wrote something poorly. But it's also because some group told people to e-mail me and those people didn't read the article, they read the post about what I wrote about. And they all e-mail me. And they all come around at the same time.

You can get away with stuff in a one-page story that you can't get away with in a book.