Best qualification for an aspiring journalist is curiosity.

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.

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

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

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

The best education for a writer, I think, is to read a lot - college can be a good place to do that.