Let me tell you a story about when I was growing up in Spain. Many Sundays, we would invite 30, 40, 50 people to the countryside, and my father would make a big paella. He put me in charge of the fire and the 'stove' - the rocks that hold the pan. But he wouldn't let me cook. I got so unbelievably upset.

I don't know any group of professionals that mobilize as fast and as often as chefs do when there are people who are in need.

I don't think anybody can claim success at any part of our lives, private or professional, if there are others that don't enjoy the same opportunities.

I love cooking for the sake of understanding how people before me used to feed themselves, used to feed their families.

With a good education and a solid childhood, Marie-Antoinette might have become one of the most admired women in Europe. As it was, the empress paid no attention to her youngest daughter until an accident of nuptial politics made the girl a candidate to marry the French dauphin.

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

I've been watching politics for 35 or 40 years and you just never know. You can have one person win the Iowa caucus and then the whole picture changes ten minutes later. The same thing can happen again after New Hampshire. I have no idea what's going to happen with our country in the future.

It appears that Wall Street is not acting as a force for economic expansion, providing access to capital for companies that make things. Rather, it seems, Wall Street is using government bailouts to lever up.