Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I was coming out of college, storytelling was very much something you did with pencil and paper, so the technological platform versatility, I think, is really valuable.
Anyone with the right mix of parental paranoia and entrepreneurial moxie can make a fortune by selling parents the equipment we think will keep us one step ahead of our kids.
It's no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets.
The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.
When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.
Teaching sometimes seems like not one profession, but every profession. We ask them to be doctor and diplomat, calf-herder, map-maker, wizard and watchman, electricians of the mind.
Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they'll go and the shape they'll take.
It's the experts in adolescent development who wax most emphatic about the value of family meals, for it's in the teenage years that this daily investment pays some of its biggest dividends.
If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe.
Whatever people thought the first time they held a portable phone the size of a shoe in their hands, it was nothing like where we are now, accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips.
After the 1960s and '70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country's highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.
The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.
We are bombarded with reasons to stay inside: we're afraid of mosquitoes because of West Nile and grass because of pesticides and sun because of cancer and sunscreen because of vitamin-D deficiency.
On the court, Jason Collins is not a huge basketball star, but he has already claimed his place in civil rights history as the first openly gay athlete to play in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues.
I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' But Valentine's Day leaves me cold.
We've seen what happens when it serves a president's interest to flaunt his faith - which is almost inevitably does, since every poll affirms that Americans want their leader to submit to some higher power.
While we meant to invite debate about some ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice.
Death will never be pretty - its sights and smells too close and crude. And it will never come under our control: it gallops where we tiptoe, rips up our routines, burns our very breath with its heat and sting.
Lyndon Johnson realized he really was President, that his identity had changed by President Kennedy's shocking death, when aides who had been like family to him minutes before, stood in his presence on Air Force One.
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright would baptize Obama, perform his marriage to Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, baptize their daughters, and draw him into the raucous, restless family of faith that Obama had never known before.
We will never know if any other president approached Nixon in paranoia, profanity or potential criminality, since only his conversations were captured, subpoenaed and ultimately released on the front pages of newspapers.
High school is a haunted house in April, when seniors act up because the end is near. Even those who hate school sometimes cling to the devil they know. And for the kids who love it, the goodbyes are hard to think about.
Eisenhower advocated a variety of strong actions which he had never taken when he was president. Maybe this was just the pattern of former presidents; maybe it reflected how much the circumstances had changed on the ground.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
Back in the really olden days, dinner was seldom a ceremonial event for U.S. families. Only the very wealthy had a separate dining room. For most, meals were informal, a kind of rolling refueling; often only the men sat down.
Americans are grateful for the connection and convenience their phones provide, helping them search for a lower price, navigate a strange city, expand a customer base or track their health and finances, their family and friends.
Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what's left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school.
Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.
Praise of blame in the moment means little: it is how their decisions play out over time that matters, and so the redemption they're looking for is of a more lasting kind. They are one another's peers; who else can really judge them?
In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.
Maybe as times get worse we get better. Our pain makes us feel other people's too; our fear lets us practice valor; we are tense, and tender as well. And among the things we can no longer afford are things we never really wanted anyway.
A lot of camps and summer programs for kids seem to have discovered that among the most valuable things they offer is what they don't offer. No Wi-Fi. No grades. No hovering parents or risk managers or parents who parent like risk managers.
New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola.
Summer is not obligatory. We can start an infernally hard jigsaw puzzle in June with the knowledge that, if there are enough rainy days, we may just finish it by Labor Day, but if not, there's no harm, no penalty. We may have better things to do.
I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.
Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.
Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.
In 2001, President George W. Bush was condemned for politicizing science with his decision to limit federal funding for stem-cell research; in 2009 President Obama was praised for reversing it, even though his decision was arguably just as political.
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
In the case of the classic Western helicopter parent, it starts with Baby Einstein and reward charts for toilet training, and it never really ends, which is why colleges have to devote so many resources to teaching parents how to leave their kids alone.
What is it about summer that makes children grow? We feed and water them more. They do get more sun, but that probably doesn't matter as much as the book they read or the rule they broke that taught them something they couldn't have learned any other way.
In his final remarks to the White House staff, on the day he resigned his office, Nixon applied a version of the lesson to himself. “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
I have two daughters: One an open book, one a locked box. So the question of privacy is a challenging one. How much do kids need? How much should we give? How do we prepare them to live in a world where the very notion of privacy opens a generational chasm?
There was a time when researchers imagined that Plan B, or the morning-after pill, might become not an emergency form of contraception but a routine one; women would take it once a month to induce a period and never even know whether they had gotten pregnant.
Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.
Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.
Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.
I live in a dumb house. Which is not to say that I don't love its quirky charm, its drafty windows and leaky fireplaces and an electrical system that protests when too many people are trying to vacuum and microwave at the same time. But charm is not always user-friendly.
Modesty means admitting the possibility of error, subsuming the self for the good of the whole, remaining open to surprise and the gifts that only failure can bring. There are many ways to practice it. Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager.
Obama was elected on a slogan of hope and change because both were in short supply: the military exhausted by two wars, the banks failing their public trust, the U.S. Congress a comedy of dysfunction, and a federal government that seemed designed to idle on the sidelines.