Borders had lousy management and made bad corporate decisions, so its fate is less like a terrible accident than a slow-motion slide into a ditch, but it's hard to be happy about a bookseller's demise.

You could go crazy thinking of how unprivate our lives really are - the omnipresent security cameras, the tracking data on our very smart phones, the porous state of our Internet selves, the trail of electronic crumbs we leave every day.

I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys.

Writing about fashion forces you to overcome the nagging feeling that fashion doesn't "matter", that it's trivial or fleeting. I just look at it anthropologically, which is different from the way I'd write about art.

Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.

In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.

I've noticed lately that it seems most intimate to not use any closing on your e-mail at all, because it seems to make it feel like you are engaged in an ongoing conversation - as if this one e-mail doesn't represent the beginning and end of the interaction but is just part of a perpetual loop of friendly back-and-forth.