Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton, but he won more than 12 million votes in the primaries and was respectfully and elaborately saluted by Hillary Clinton, whom he has endorsed.

Believe me, those great death bed speeches are written ahead of time.

Fidel Castro takes up so much space in the Cuban mind. It's hard for us to imagine as Americans - isn't it? - how much of everyday conversation he's dominated for 50 years.

Fidel Castro was a charismatic revolutionary and a ruthless leader who allowed no dissent.

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.

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.

I was a kid and it was kind of scabrous, and it wasn't the sacrilege that bothered me so much as the obscenity that challenged a 14-year-old American. But over the years, I came to have a keen appreciation of Charlie Hebdo and what it did.