Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead.

I get younger people who watch Conan or The Daily Show, but before that it was mostly people who knew me from public radio. Those people are kind of old.

I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period).

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?