I know end might be near as this is only day of my adulthood I’ve seen my mother and she hasn’t asked, ‘Why that shirt?’

Charlie Hebdo were the licensed anarchist clowns of the society.

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.

I became a pedant of the form. I did my graduate work in art history and particularly in the history of French satirical cartooning. And that made me aware of what a rich and resilient tradition this seemingly scabrous sacrilegious magazine still represented in French life.

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.

Murder is easy. Comedy is hard.

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.