When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.

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.

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank. It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.

Personally, I've decided to stop evolving.

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

Since Hillary Clinton is the first time we've had a woman who was a serious contender for president, it's been an adjustment to watch her more changeable looks, and to see the lengths she goes to get the right lighting and to make the right wardrobe choices. Her campaign is devising strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal.