For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

It's generally sort of sociologically observed that the better educated people are, the more liberal they tend to be, which would suggest that professors are going to be more liberal than the general public.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.

The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you're still only on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that's a very long period of what's essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.