Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over [*].

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

"I need to be managing a sexier project [*] to boost my career."

"As a friend of mine said, it takes half a second for a baby to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean."

Terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists.

"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said, referring to terrorists. "Nooooo!" the audience roared.

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals" everything is made of chemicals, down to the proteins, hormones and genetic materials in our cells.

Every time Bruce Schneier smiles, an amateur cryptographer dies.

"It looks like politicians are poised to dominate the political discourse of the country for years to come," said analyst Maria Lawson of the Free Enterprise Institute.

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!

Your mind is for having ideas--not holding them.

"I think the mistake now is holding back when you've got a good idea."

Watch all of this video. It's astounding.

One law enforcement official played down Mr. Defreitas’s ability to carry out an attack, calling him “a sad sack” and “not a Grade A terrorist.”

He's the slacker of the bunch, and a cross between a sad sack and a prophet.

“I knew it wasn’t about me, a 22-year-old girl from a small town in Tennessee who just wants to help the world. But you can’t help but take it personally.”

Matt Gross is "seeking low-cost high adventure on a 12-week road trip across the United States." His next stop is Tennessee. Can you suggest something?

The CIA acknowledged that the dates of Ms. Wilson’s employment had mistakenly been disclosed, although a spokesman said that did not mean the information was no longer classified.

“Frankly,” said the spokesman, Mark Mansfield, the release of the information in 2006, in response to a query from Ms. Wilson about retirement benefits, was “an honest-to-goodness administrative error.”

The device still lacks the control needed for pro sports or safecracking, but it's an honest-to-goodness bionic arm.

From here on, it’s nothing but “National Bingo Night” (an actual, honest-to-goodness ABC show airing at 8 p.m. Fridays), and “Pirate Master” (an actual, honest-to-goodness CBS show premiering May 31).

"It's nice to see a billionaire jump up and down with honest to goodness excitement, not like, 'Oh yeah, I just made another million bucks today."

Honest to goodness, these people have nothing better to do than debate how close strippers should be allowed to get to patrons and how much they can take off and when.

"They’re trying to get the cat back into the bag.”

In Israel, a man clad only in underwear and a T-shirt wrestled a wild leopard to the floor and pinned it for 20 minutes after the cat leaped through a window and hopped into bed with his sleeping family.

"This kind of thing doesn't happen every day," said Arthur Du Mosch, 49, a nature guide.

... [ Read More (1.2k in body) ]

Somehow I missed this at the time.

The use of the transitive, action-packed verb do has a long history of being followed by a direct object with no intervening article like a or the.

Its vogue began, I think, early in the past century with the question to a prospective domestic employee: "Do you do windows?"

The narcotics lingo of the 1960s advanced the usage: Addicts would do acid, do speed, do drugs; no native speaker would say "do the drugs." But when Hollywood agents and producers began replacing have with do in "Let's do lunch," a backlash set in; it was ridiculed as jargon.

Undersecretary of State John Bolton brushed aside a query about a carrot-and-stick approach to Iran with a subtle "I don't do carrots."

What makes this web of reactionary ideologues a menace to the world is that they believe complex, historic problems have simple, instant, military solutions.

Democrats have been recycling Bolton quotes from his speeches and writings over the years in an attempt to portray him as a unilateralist hostile even to the existence of the world body.

In July 2003, he condemned North Korea's Kim Jong-il for living like royalty, while for millions of his people, life was a "hellish nightmare". Pyongyang was incensed, labelling him "human scum" and refusing to continue negotiating with him.

... and for a few variations on the theme ...

"I don't do mending!" She said, "Asking a quilter to do mending is like asking Picasso to paint your garage."

"Females - I can't take much of them. That's why I have a lot more male friends, because females are very bitchy, and I can't do bitchy."

"I don't do dumps. I've done a Dumpster or two, but I don't do dumps."

I don't do rats. Snakes, yes; spiders, if I have to; big ugly men with guns, only in emergencies, but not rats, not ever.

I don't do it as much as I used to. You come in — the fantasy is that you wear medical clothing and it's an emergency situation — but you know a lot of times, people bring in many, many people ...

Alice: I don't do Jersey!
Bob: You're missing lots of great food. Really. A true Crumb Tracker never fears crossing the river.

In many respects this is a story about carelessness and about how even the best of intentions can go perilously awry.

"I cannot tell you the selfish pleasure I get out of working with President Clinton," Mr. Bush said.

A survey of 1,500 British retirees found that 45 percent said they stayed at one job too long.
"To avoid similar grief, write out your current regrets and what you wish you had done instead."

"People said, ‘This goose has no owner.’ "

"Now we all just have to figure out what to do next."

American officials hope that Afghanistan’s drug problem will someday be only as bad as that of Colombia.

"There’s no sugar-coating this ... at the end of the day, it’s a high risk venture."

"What I would like is for people to look back in 10 years and say, ‘Yeah, these guys got it right.’ "

"One of the most rewarding things is when people say, ‘I really don’t like the outcome, but the process was fair.’ "

"It sounded nutty at first," Mr. Monroe recalled, "but the more and more you get into it, the more sense it makes."

... the ideas espoused by Mr. Falwell and Mr. Wolfowitz, though both were valued on the right, did not mesh; they were unconnected, spokes in the large conservative wheel ...

"Red flags should have been waving."

We have different words for art and idea because they are two different things.

Economists use the term "survivorship bias" to describe the recollection of past moments by what has survived into the present, filtering out whatever elements did not bear fruit.

"We’ve reached a tipping point. It’s ... [ Read More (1.9k in body) ]

About 15 percent of Iraqis have left their homes. Since the upsurge of violence following the bombing of a Shiite holy site in Samarra 14 months ago, the flight has been large and constant. It now reaches a rate of up to 50,000 people per month.

... withstanding the surge of Pentecostal Protestantism in Latin America ...

"The government is doing more slogans than action."

Afghan patience is wearing dangerously thin, officials warn.

"I had the support of the guys in the S&M and leather bars ..." he said. The objections came from other sectors of the gay population ... "It was like Sunnis and Shiites," he said.

"If your focus is on how faith-based organizations are getting earmarks, I’m your guy."

As for whether people will think he has a fetish, he said he can’t help that. "I just have no way of dealing with that," he said with a laugh. "People will think what they’re going to think. I understand that."

"This is the destiny of traitors," the gunmen yelled as they shot their victims.

"The number of threats is not decreasing. They are only transforming and changing the guise. As during the Third Reich era, these new threats show the same contempt for human life and claims to world exclusiveness and diktat."

The danger of not understanding the lessons of history is matched by the danger of using simplistic historical analogies.

"You’ve got these two basic liberal values on a kind of collision course."

"Let other federal agencies, as more than a dozen already do, cover the ‘bugs and bunnies.’ But let our spies be spies," Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, wrote Thursday in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article.

The idea that the soul must be cleansed through pain, prevalent in Tolstoy’s era, unsettles most of the cla... [ Read More (1.0k in body) ]

You can't get to the end of the day without hearing somebody say "back in the day."

Back in the day, there were boards. Bulletin Board Systems. BBS's. No Net, no Web, no cyberspace, nothing.

Back in the day, I was in Jersey. I don't know if it was the center of the BBS world; it was probably the ass-end of it, like it was of everything else. But it felt like the center.

He should know. Back in the day, when he was struggling to make it as an actor in New York, he did it for $3 an hour.

After graduation, he left town and spent several years in Nashville.

Back in the day, it was a tent city.

Along the way it lost that status, but back in the day it was a biggie.

"I used to party with him back in the day, apparently," said Tom.

Back in the day, he was literally "the man with the plan" ...

The great thing about Nashville back in the day was that the old guys hung out where the young guys were.

"It used to be a pretty good organization back in the day. We're going to start putting things back together," he remarked.

"I don't want a bunch of old heads talking about how great things were back in the day."

Back in the day 2600 hertz was the frequency that AT&T put on all of their long distance lines ...

I'm not saying it was better back in the day when Ma Bell was our only choice. Well, actually, ...

He's reluctant to look back. He doesn't want to fixate on "back in the day" whimsy. But this was special, so ... [ Read More (0.9k in body) ]

The American military has installed an elaborate system of barricades and checkpoints ... the enclaves created by this system, which American commanders frequently call “gated communities" ...

In a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed ...

"If your country was occupied by Iraq, would you fight?" he asked. "Enough said."

Their plans may have been dreamy. But at least, they had plans.

American officials readily acknowledge that they have entered an uncertain marriage of convenience ...

"The relationship ... is like a Catholic marriage ..."

She smiled much of the time, but also shifted in her seat, clenched her jaw muscles and fiddled with her hair.

She declared her atheism as a girl, and later, her intolerance for pretension. (“I have had enough of these dinners where people say ‘I think’ all the time,” she wrote. She wanted to know.)

Officials are wondering if the longtime reliance on him has begun to outlive its usefulness.

Basically, the company was willing to bet $500 or $750 that if he heard the same drug pitch all day, by the end of the day he’d be so brainwashed that he could not possibly prescribe any other drug but ours.

... at the end of the day, he almost always did the right thing.

McCain is the hell-raiser who hides an introspective bent behind his pose as a cocky flyboy.

The problem was reported to the government last week by a farmer in Illinois who stumbled across the data on the Internet.

"I was bored and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there."
She was able to identify almost 30,000 records in the database that contained Social Security numbers.
"I was stunned," she said. "The numbers were right there in plain view in this database that anyone can access."

"Tom is not afraid to stick to his guns."

"Instead of having turned to Washington for answers and solutions, y’all have turned to the person next to you."

"Some women just don’t have the get up and go."

The toll is visible in Hollandale, a tired town in the impoverished Delta region of northwest Mississippi.

Jamekia Brown, 22 and two months pregnant with her third child, lives next to the black people’s cemetery in the part of town called No Name, where multiple generations crowd into cheap clapboard houses and trailers.

So it took only a minute to walk to the graves of Ms. Brown’s first two children, marked with temporary metal signs because she cannot afford tombstones.

"We were a little late to the game. We should have been out there making these arguments, making the case more forcefully before people began framing the debate for us ... and in false terms."

In military terms, the American initiative to the Russians on missile defense will include an invitation "toward fundamental integration of our systems."

In Russia, how can anyone predict the future when it’s so hard to predict the past?

Why had historians not used these papers before? ... What really happened doesn’t fit any fashionable academic dogmas.

See also Parts I, II, III, IV, and V.

"I stared as one -- and then the other -- of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased."

In 1985, when I graduated, a Wall Street recruiter actually told me that, with a last name like Georgiopoulos, I’d have trouble getting an investment banking job.

When we talk to our children about sex, about alcohol and drugs, or about the dangers of the Internet, we give them limitations and warnings. But when it comes to the subject of work, we tell them that they can be whatever they aspire to be; that they should aim high, work hard and dream big. What we rarely do is tell them how hard some days are. Or that along the road, they might have to compromise, or detour, or backtrack. To warn them would be to discourage them. Or so our thinking goes.

At times, the software industry appears to be racing downhill while still trying to build its car.

"It was just a big fireball coming at me."

As he has waged battles big and small, he can be heard bellowing, "Tom!" several times a day.

"One block from Vox Pop!" he exclaimed. "You know Vox Pop?"

There is probably no better guide to where the court is headed than in a careful inventory of where Justice O’Connor has been.

"It’s understandable that you would look at someone’s twitter ..."

"The hardest-hitting, cruelest, most affecting collection of sound and image this side of Buñuel"

The established physics of Washington: rapidly diminishing support in one’s own party times the number of instances in which one has failed to convincingly explain away accusations of incompetence or malfeasance equals the certainty of rapid resignation.

Romney is fond of PowerPoint and terms like "strategic audits" and "wow moments."

"I’m not a big-game hunter," said Mitt Romney, campaigning in Indianapolis. "I’ve made that very clear. I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will."

See also Parts I, II, III, IV, and VI.

If these reunited bands meant something to you in an earlier time, perhaps you’re feeling the dirty power of money, or the lameness of aging.

Featuring a shadowy, half-coherent narrative involving a nefarious plot by Bill Gates to acquire jewels from the princess of Monaco, it asks its audiences to travel into the depths of Chinatown, into the back room of a restaurant in Little Italy and even onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Along the way the gaggle of audience members (no more than 10 a show) must decipher puzzles and read crude maps to figure out the windy route.

I realized that you have to play off the specificity of a locale in order to arrive at something universal.

When in 2003 Chirac told the Eastern Europeans who backed Bush and Blair on Iraq that they had "missed an opportunity to shut up," his blunt talk upset a lot of people and did little for France’s popularity. But in all of this, he has been proved right.

Car bombings and other violence now kill an average of 100 people a day. Two out of three Iraqis have no regular access to clean water.

"It’s not an easy decision for a woman to give up her monthly menses," said Ronny Gal, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. But if the new pill, called Lybrel, is approved, Mr. Gal predicts an onslaught of advertising meant to persuade women to do just that.

I know I am back in the States because at the hotel breakfasts they are all talking about money.

A urology resident finally managed to get a catheter into the bladder. Urine gushed out -- nearly half a gallon of it. A full bladder normally holds only a quarter of that. The urology resident looked at the intern: "I guess now we know why his kidneys weren’t working."

"Tom doesn’t get spooked."

"I have reached the point where I get phantom vibrations, even when I’m not carrying the thing," he said. "That sure doesn’t sound too healthy, does it?"

"I quit smoking 28 years ago," she said, "and that was easier than being without my BlackBerry."

Surely, this is the future of music players: instant access to any song, any album, whenever and wherever you’re in the mood.

"It was the worst case of nouveau riche you can possibly imagine."

... the stated yearning to stay abreast of things may mask more visceral and powerful needs ... "It’s idiotic in terms of substance. ... But it’s vital in terms of meaning."

See also Parts I, II, III, V, and VI.