People who face too many demands - two careers, two children - often scale back somehow. The Obamas scaled up.

Michelle Obama has gone from political skeptic to political partner to a woman with a White House agenda of her own, and an approval rating higher than the president's.

I've learned that the best political reporters never make predictions!

The prospect that I could actually be a journalist triggered a 'Who do you think you are?' reaction in me. It was only in going to law school and being unhappy there that I realized that I really, really had to try it.

Same-sex marriage is not the final nail in the coffin for traditional marriage. It is just another road sign toward the substitution of government for God. Every moral discussion now pits the wisest moral arbiters among us - the Supreme Court, President Obama - against traditional religion.

Faith itself is a horrible mechanism that stunts the growth of ideas. It also stunts the act of questioning, and it does this by pushing the idea that you have to have faith - and that nothing has to be proven.

Words are also seeds, and when dropped into the invisible spiritual substance, they grow and bring forth after their kind.

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.