There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific.

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.