The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that’s going to involve 16 screens on the web page… that’s asking a lot of people.
All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.
In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.
I come from a family of teachers, and I believe ideas matter; the good ones deserve reverence, and the bad ones, defiance.
I’ve always found that once you’re in the door of a place and you have the chance to show how you operate and how talented you are, then anything can happen.
Terror works like a musical composition, so many instruments, all in tune, playing perfectly together to create their desired effect. Sorrow and horror and fear.
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
All wars, even the noblest, bring a reckoning of means and ends.
Some people are born strong or stretchy, or with a tungsten will.
We are bombarded with reasons to stay inside: we’re afraid of mosquitoes because of West Nile and grass because of pesticides and sun because of cancer and sunscreen because of vitamin-D deficiency.
Time is valuable; people are busy.
Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.
New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you’d be able to tour the city by gondola.
Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.
America’s presidents tend to die young. Maybe it is in the nature of the men who reach such heights, or of the job once they attain it.
Adolescence, that swampy zone between safety and power, is best patrolled by adults armed with sense and mercy, not guns and a badge.
I’ve been grateful that ‘Time’s’ reach and mandate is so broad; anything you’re interested in, you can usually write about.
Members of royal families are born into a world of indulgence and entitlement, and the princelings who grow up that way may never have to develop any discipline.
I like the fact that glass ceilings are breaking all over.
You can’t hold up a blog; you can hold up a magazine.
What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.
While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.
The crossroads of science and politics is a dodgy place.
Sometimes justice is at its most merciful when it’s blind.
Calling Rand Paul ‘the most interesting man in politics’ is an invitation to an argument – but one we suspect he’d love to have.
When I was coming out of college, storytelling was very much something you did with pencil and paper, so the technological platform versatility, I think, is really valuable.
I live in a dumb house. Which is not to say that I don’t love its quirky charm, its drafty windows and leaky fireplaces and an electrical system that protests when too many people are trying to vacuum and microwave at the same time. But charm is not always user-friendly.
Obama was elected on a slogan of hope and change because both were in short supply: the military exhausted by two wars, the banks failing their public trust, the U.S. Congress a comedy of dysfunction, and a federal government that seemed designed to idle on the sidelines.
We want laws to be applied predictably.
Rooting from the sidelines is the most democratic of sporting rites: no skyboxes, no tickets required, just an unabashed will to holler and wave.
Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.
Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they’ll go and the shape they’ll take.
Enter politics, and you enter the glass house; there are no secrets and no places to hide.
Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war – and the troubles that flow from it.
Death will never be pretty – its sights and smells too close and crude. And it will never come under our control: it gallops where we tiptoe, rips up our routines, burns our very breath with its heat and sting.
Barack Obama wants teacher service scholarships.
Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino’s alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.
In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.
Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it’s practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.
When you are a media celebrity, every word you speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak.
Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.
You can’t predict when a crisis might hit your family, whether it’s with an elderly parent or with your children.
The days of the Pentagon Papers debates seem long past, when a sudden transparency yielded insight into fights over war and peace and freedom and security; the transparency afforded by Twitter and Facebook yields insights that extend no further than a lawmaker’s boundless narcissism and a culture’s pitiless prurience.
As you probably know, I’ve written a lot about the presidency, so it’s obviously exciting when you get to interview a president and write about it.
Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you’re not looking.
Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting.
Democracy presumes that we’re all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.
‘Sesame Street’s’ genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things – death, divorce, danger – in terms that children understand and accept.
There are many things that matter much more than an editor’s gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.
We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.
Professor Obama has at least talked to us like we’re adults.
Teaching sometimes seems like not one profession, but every profession. We ask them to be doctor and diplomat, calf-herder, map-maker, wizard and watchman, electricians of the mind.
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