Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging.

I approach stories as a private educational enterprise: I want to learn about something. I teach myself through research, reporting, and thinking, and then, when I feel like I know the story, I tell it to readers.

When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes.

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 don't turn to greeting cards for wisdom and advice, but they are a fine reflection of the general drift of the culture.

When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.

Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it's more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone's throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale.