Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.

Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.

At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.

A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time.

I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you're somehow able to look at that him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That's empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.

Ireland starts for me with the end of The Dead, which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos.