Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.

Charlie Hebdo were the licensed anarchist clowns of the society.

Race, blood, lineage, and nationality don't matter; they're just the way that small minds keep score. All that matters about blood is that it's warm and that it beats through a loving heart.

I take Charb's point, but at some point has Charlie Hebdo been trying to have it both ways because some of what they do is not funny.

In journalism, when we want to get a story over the jumps, we refer to it as a universal experience, but it almost never is. There is one universal experience, that's death. That is something we are all going to experience at some distance in the lives of loved ones, strangers and friends, people around us and certainly our own.

There are times when the adoption process is exhausting and painful and makes you want to scream. But, I am told, so does childbirth.

It's not the cost (although that pinches), or the time (though that grinds). After a while, it's the sheer galling indignity of being asked to prove, pay, and prove all over again that you're a worthy parent. Any true parent will tell you that that is impossible to prove in advance.