The easiest way to get Dugg is to have a trivial idea.

Once having committed stupidity, it seemed preferable to remain consistently stupid until the bitter end. I would stick to my guns, even if they were pointed at my own head.

Waiting to do something until you can be sure of doing it exactly right means waiting for ever.

The settlers are calling their compound "House of Peace," but are also considering "Martyrs’ Peak."

Pakistan is the most urbanized country in South Asia.

"Look, this is a democracy," said one woman there who refused to be identified.

And so what kind of country do I want to live in? I want to live in the kind of country where a woman doesn't get slapped for wearing a "Kitty Not Happy" T-shirt.

Most of the essays in "Monkeyluv" are engaging. This one is a masterpiece.

Taking for granted the misery of the human condition, goth turns depression into an aesthetic, a semi-ironic pose — a perfect style for the awkward and self-conscious.

Something about our fast-paced, super consumerist society seems to have robbed the teaching vocation of the respect it deserves.

I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that "critical thinking" is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority.

Public-school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents, "accessing" K-8 education in unforeseen ways. Big media and big politics are all flying through an electronic meteor shower just now, and not all will survive.

Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities.

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people’s lives. They enjoy it excessively. It's not one of the species’ more attractive addictions, and, on the whole, it's probably better to indulge it on the life of a person you have never met.

It is no small irony that in an age in which technology allows us to indulge these emotions as never before, our political culture systematically misunderstands them.

The rise of the handkerchief was not simply a function of shifting social mores. It was also a part of the "civilizing process" through which the haves became readily distinguishable from the have-nots.

Four million people in the US play World of Warcraft.

As long as we value living in a free society, we will be vulnerable to those who do harm -- because they want to and know how to do it.

The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow.

National identity has always been socially constructed; it revolves around history, symbols, heroes and the stories that a community tells about itself. This sense of attachment to a place and a history should not be rubbed out, but it should be made as open as possible to new citizens.

When do Chinese dynasties fall? Not when the urban intelligentsia is restless, as was the case in the 1980s before the massacre at Tienanmen Square, but when the rural peasant class finally rises up.