The three touchstones that woke Buddha up - sickness, old age, and death - are a pretty good place to start when crafting a tragic tale. And if we need to get more specific: heartbreak, destruction, miscomprehension, natural disasters, betrayal, and the waste of human potential.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published 'V.' The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon.

The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed.

High-speed Internet access, or broadband, is giving entrepreneurs anywhere an unprecedented chance to disrupt entire industries and transform our country.

I really believe that we don't have to make a trade-off between security and privacy. I think technology gives us the ability to have both.

I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and before the Internet and before everything, just to get anything interesting, you had to go on vacation to San Francisco or something. But I think when you're in the middle of America, you feel very jealous of not just comedy but music that you don't have access to.

I liked to scrapbook and collage a whole lot in high school. I'm always ripping things out of magazines, and always collecting quotes from the Internet. When I was 17, I loved AIM. I was obsessed with my buddy list!