"The bill had support from the opinion elite in this country," Mr. Beck said. "But we built a grass-roots army, consumed with passion for a cause, and used the power of the Internet to go around the elites and defeat a disastrous amnesty bill."

People rarely weigh the cost of not taking a risk. Those are the ones that get you.

Why are we looking so hard? And what do we expect to find?

"I was terribly in love with him, but we were separated by race and by the fact that he hated me."

I was belligerent and obnoxious, but I didn’t mean it. That’s how we debated in my family.

We produce and replicate every day the culture in which our children grow up, a culture in which Paris Hilton gets news coverage 24/7 and young Iraqi refugees being forced into prostitution in Syria get a couple of minutes on the evening news; a culture in which kids, like their parents, sprint through each overscheduled day; a culture in which parents don’t have the time -- or take the time -- to model reading for their children.

"We don’t hang together, but we’re cool."

I did Ecstasy with her and felt as if I were peering through the windows of a crowded house I no longer lived in.

"They really think that they’re helping, but they’re actually messing it up bad."

... the smiles and warm embraces between Presidents Bush and Putin just a few weekends ago at the so-called lobster summit in Maine did little to soften the Kremlin’s pique ...

"The famous Kalashnikov assault rifle has become not only an example of daring innovative thought but also a symbol of the talent and creative genius of our people," President Vladimir V. Putin said in a decree.

"The point is that everybody is nobody."

The Texas Legislature has taken up a bill to tax strip clubs, dedicating the money to education.

By day, he studied, and by night, he fell in with a crowd of young radicals.

... the Kurdish Pride Gang of Nashville, thought to be the nation’s only Kurdish street gang ...

Just off a wide commercial strip called Nolensville Pike, women in head scarves shop at the Judy International Market.

Downtown, just steps away from the elegant plaza filled with voluptuous sculptures by another native son, Fernando Botero, street children sniff glue out of plastic bags and snort cocaine.

"George Washington called it his headquarters, so we started calling it that."

"Yes, yes, the men do wash their own dishes. It’s not a hotel here."

"In January, we thought it would be our No. 1 problem, that it would suck everything up," Mr. Schumer said.

"We did everything to build a good reputation here in Nashville and elsewhere, and tried to be good Americans, and all of a sudden a few irresponsible hoodlums have tried to tarnish the reputations we’ve been working so hard over the years to create. That’s sad."

Well, that and the unexpected lunacy of killer tumbleweeds.

The entire scene recalled the title of a 1995 scholarly article about the demographics of contradancing, "Yuppies Invaded My Tradition at Midnight."

"They are real examples of a kind of global, multicultural kind of world openness and awareness that was way ahead of its time."

"Poor Chinese kids don’t want to go to school with poor black kids," Mr. Russ said flatly.

The former mayor, warts and all, represented "the real black power as opposed to the theoretical black power" that many imagined should exist.

China recently blocked Evian water from France and dried apricots, raisins and orange pulp from the United States, saying the goods were filthy or contaminated.

With surveys showing climate change a growing concern, officials and advocates say they hope people will consider the implications of billions of bottles.

"Nobody asks what the payback period is for a marble lobby," he said.

When I got married my father sat me down and said: "Flowers are an expense, but you know what’s really expensive? Divorce." I’ve remembered that.

Your well-intentioned lie furthered the couple’s building a life together on a falsehood.

Like other fast-growing areas across the country, Effingham had to learn that large-scale expansion often comes at a price. In the county’s case, it was the long-term integrity of the vast underground water supply that serves it as well as other major areas in the South.