Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day.

I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.

I would say that during my lifetime, one of the worst political scandals in Sweden was absolutely what happened surrounding the affair of the submarines in Swedish waters in 1982, where there were supposed to be Russian submarines close to Stockholm. And the military of Sweden never got one up.

All we have and are is based on the Christian faith, which has shaped law, government, morals, music, landscape, and education here for a thousand years.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

Let's dare to release our immature fantasies of a magically faultless U.S. system and a magically protected election process. We have been lucky as a nation, but sometimes continued luck depends on action.

In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this.