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

I've definitely written people e-mails telling them I've loved their stories, but that seems more like a professional journalist thing to do.

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

With a Q&A, you need obviously to keep it snappy.

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.

When Time got rid of my column, I thought it was all over. It was really sad. And then, I just started pushing it to lots of places. And I thought someone would run my column, I thought it was popular, and no one wanted it.

I can't explain why I don't read comments. Maybe because I worked at Time for so long and they don't have them, so I keep forgetting that they're there.