Christopher Nolan's astounding third Batman feature, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' represents the true maturation of the superhero movie - and provides the key to understanding the bottomless craving moviegoers have for these films, 34 years after the Christopher Reeve Superman gave birth to the genre.

Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.

When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight - though whether the insight was conscious or not I don't know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model.

The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.

People evolve and grow, and life is fascinating and fun and tragic.

You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

It's easy to grow 300% in your first year or two, when you're starting with nothing and people first hear about your service. What separates a potential colossus from other businesses is the capacity to keep growing at that rate in years four, five, and beyond.

The red directors were one of the main political forces. Another force was the former Soviet ministers who lost everything because of the transformation of the Soviet Union to Russia.