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.

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

I went to a football school, which meant that I went to a university that served up education and was simultaneously operating a sports franchise.

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.

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know.

I suppose I do have one embarrassing passion- I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.

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.