I am unusually Halloween-attentive, because, as it happens, I was born on Halloween, so for me it has always been an occasion of great moment.

One of my favorite activities as a teen-ager was to watch television over the phone with my best friend.

The one thing I've discovered about social media is that people love answering questions. In fact, it sometimes feels like at any given moment, millions of people are online who have been waiting for exactly the question you fire off.

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.

To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it's in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy.

When it comes to consumer electronics, I'm a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can't resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta.

I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers' block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right!