“I can see a future where fire is an illegal domain, like tobacco in some nations and the gasoline engine in California thirty years from now (the modern republic seems to recoil from the glow of combustion).”

Through it all, and likely knowing far more about the goings-on of the world than you or I do, Queen Elizabeth II was somehow a steadfast and unchanging presence, an almost natural feature in the landscape of humanity.

The modern market exists to give us what we currently don’t already have, and … what we do not have is the luxury of waiting.

The Zanesville cut was one of the ways I kept the pulse of the heartland, to know if it was dying faster than me. Happily, it never was.

Christmas is an island of the divine amidst a sea of the mundane. Kids know this, which is why a great deal of their Gregorian calendars revolve around it.

The man-on-the-street interview is an integral part of any self-respecting newspaper … The Mount Vernon News used to do one regularly before they moved their newsroom to Manila, besides Buzzfeed’s offices.

You would think you could trust professors who hem and haw over semicolons to get properly sentimental about a building, but no.

Larger institutions are merely the collective inertia of private hopes and wills, and I think many of us face the raw and primitive work of having to start over again, within.

A John Deere’s gearbox has a great deal more personality than a whole server farm of artificial intelligence, anyway, and more motive power besides.

You are neither a vehicle nor a pedestrian, but simply a weak third-world state or a malevolent superpower depending on your lane.

Panned as pedestrian at the time, I praise it for the same reason; it is very much a song about walking about the town that I met in it.

If your young child turns to you upon arrival, as they often do in these vacation commercials, and says "I wish we could stay here forever," you have failed. 

The arrival of pumpkins at market, in particular, is one thing I feel should receive 24/7 coverage.

The differences between the technological revolutions of the 20th century and the 21st century is that the first was a victory against nature; the second is a victory against mankind.

If you wish to kill a thing, discuss it in technical terms.

It is almost a transactional thing; you hope your future interment will be generous enough to place you beyond the reach of whatever future mobs you anger, if you do this creature that kindness.

The removal of Lee's monument is typical of our epoch's scorched-earth discourse.

As an opinions editor, I was unfettered by facts.

Somehow, many nights become few. The lease says so. The evening says otherwise.

It was a moment Kruschev and Nixon could not have imagined, standing there in the kitchen.