My longest love affair: with a book.

Of course we all know people who aren't cut out for college, but I know it's a mistake to think of education only as a route to a better career. Reading books, studying history - all these things contribute to making us better citizens, too.

While the fashion industry may, at least at the top end, be thriving, the notion of fashion itself is becoming more and more meaningless. Any discipline in fashion has long since evaporated; the idea of a single fashionable skirt length, or heel height, is incomprehensible. The definition of the fashionable has become so skimpy that it refers not to the mode of dress of everyday people--the clothes that have sufficiently caught the popular imagination to be worn in a widespread manner--but only to the styles that momentarily excite members of the fashion caravan.

I'm not a policy expert - I am only arguing that there is more to an education than an economic ticket.

I would have thought that one of the things one should learn from college is that nothing is guaranteed. Even if you study something as vocational as accountancy, you still may end up not getting a job as an accountant.

Books gave us a way to shape ourselves - to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be. They were part of our self-fashioning, no less than our clothes.

I think it's a terrible mistake to only think in terms of a degree "buying" you something.