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.

There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.

The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.

The days of the Pentagon Papers debates seem long past, when a sudden transparency yielded insight into fights over war and peace and freedom and security; the transparency afforded by Twitter and Facebook yields insights that extend no further than a lawmaker's boundless narcissism and a culture's pitiless prurience.

I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book 'War is a Racket.'

War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

I'd quite like to have one place where I stay put. And I don't like living in cities all the time. In order to have ideas, you have to have some peace and quiet.

I never will have peace of mind. I'm not constructed that way. Some things in life can be horrible.