We are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and all that we have to offer, in the end, is love.

Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief.

At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.

Football is Lotto for kids from economically vulnerable neighborhoods.

Football offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas "wars."

Every now and then, I'll run into someone who claims not to like chocolate, and while we live in a country where everyone has the right to eat what they want, I want to say for the record that I don't trust these people, that I think something is wrong with them, and that they're probably - and this must be said - total duds in bed.

Even a hundred and fifty years ago, football was popular because it provided a manly spectacle that lots of men needed, after the industrial revolution. We went from a culture that lived out doors and expanded the frontier and fought the Indians to a bunch of guys in offices. So football provided this jolt, a kind of exalted cult of masculinity. And it still does that. Perhaps even more so today.