I think the evangelicals think they're in a holy war now.

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt.

I think Hillary Clinton's a very clever politician but she would be too easy to stereotype the way John Kerry was.

Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk.

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. [...] Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.

Women have become so obsessed with not withering, they've forgotten that there are infinite ways to be beautiful.