It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa's VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy.

If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter.

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.

The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director.

Satire doesn't effect change.

Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.

Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.