Make the important interesting.

Make the important interesting.

Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.

A basic rule of life for reporters is that you should spend your time talking with and learning about people who are not sending you press releases, rather than those who are.

As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

Chinese emissions are a problem not just for its own people but also for the world. It has now overtaken the U.S. as the biggest carbon emitter; most of the coal that is burned anywhere on Earth is burned in China.

Contrary to what you might think, China's economy is relatively less efficient, and more polluting, than those of rich countries.

Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.

Everyone in the Chinese economic world knows that the country is not going to move out of cheap-workhouse status, toward the realm of 'real' rich-country corporate power and prosperity, unless (among other changes) it begins removing these price distortions.

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.

For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.

I am about as pro-Google a person as you're going to find in the media. I've had friends at all levels of the company since its founding, and still do now.

I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.

I have relentlessly beat the drum for Google's 'two-step' authentication systems for Gmail and other services, which radically reduce the likelihood that your account can be hacked from afar.

I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the 'Boston Phoenix.' I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone.

I've learned that I need to spell out, even in cases seemingly so blatant, that in fact I am not taking this at face value and am being 'sarcastic.'

In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

No real-world human being brings to the U.S. presidency the range of attributes necessary for full success in the job.

Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.

The air that people breathe in many Chinese cities has become dangerously polluted. Their food supply is subject to constant contamination scandals. Now it appears that not merely stagnant ponds but the water people draw from deep underground is already tainted.

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

When a company is charging money for a product - as Evernote does for all above its most basic service, and same for Dropbox and SugarSync - you understand its incentive for sticking with that product.

Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

I loved dinosaurs, I loved space, and I thought maybe I'd be the first paleo-astronaut.

As a kid, books were my great escape and my salvation.

For me, exercise is more than just physical “ it's therapeutic.

War was forced upon mankind in his original civil and social condition.

Racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional. All provisions of federal state or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle.

I'm like the Bionic Man.

I've been lucky - I've been an actor for eight years and I've never been out of work.

The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

You can't get AIDS from a hug or a handshake or a meal with a friend.

We have a number of difficulties facing our nation, but I believe fatherlessness is right at the top of the list.

China and the U.S. have a very symbiotic relationship which will not decline any time soon. There are more shared interests as compared to shared differences and for this reason relations will continue to be good.

If there's one thing I've learnt, it's that I don't think a man ever looks better than when he's in a suit. So I'm wearing them increasingly, not in my personal life, but in my professional life, and I'm really enjoying it.

The appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a congealed sliding of the whole universe.

Standing up on the right to trial by jury is something that, really, a lot of people should agree with, you know, both on the Right and the Left.

Life is a canvas of many strokes where shades from different palettes meet into a picture so concrete that some forget it is their own, so become framed themselves.

Narcissistic people are always struggling with the fact that the rest of the world doesn't revolve around them

I am a Piscean, and they have a lovingly detached attitude towards life.

Have I got the right to experiment with my child's life?

My original inspiration was my mom: a few years after the death of my dad, she started dating one my teachers!

I'm absolutely doing what I enjoy.