I just wanted to have fun for myself - I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions.

I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print.

I just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I've been or something I've done. Or politics. It's going to what's on my mind at the moment.

The cloud that descended on Black Rock on Monday was not for the past but the future. How much will this debacle chill the pursuit of other risky investigations?

TV journalism is a much more collaborative, horizontal business than print reporting. It has to be, because of the logistics. Anchors are wholly dependent on producers to do all the hustling.

I'm trying to be entertaining without being mean.

In TV, you always feel you are standing on the tracks of an oncoming train.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

To win respect, the networks seem to feel they have to keep absurdly overstating their anchors' reporting cred.

Admitting weakness seems to be such a severe psychic threat for Bush that when he makes a mistake it's safer just to reinforce it. The strategy creates a perverse system of rewards and punishments.

I just wanted to have fun for myself - I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions.

In the end, Dan Rather's legend skewered him, CBS and the craft of journalism.

Nothing is better for a young journalist than to go and write about something that other people don't know about. If you can afford to send yourself to some foreign part, I still think that's by far the best way to break in.

'America' is synonymous with opportunity.

'Out of the box' corporate thinking helped carry real American innovation out in a box. A pine box.

'The Daily Beast' and Howard Kurtz have parted company.

'The Daily Beast' competes in the highly Darwinian media world filled with hyper-smart, highly adaptive, tool-using people with opposable thumbs.

'Vogue' celebrates plenty of women of substance.

'Wingnuts' is the first book bearing the imprint of Beast Books.

'Worshipping in private,' as Obama does, comes off as just another form of annoying elitism.

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

After so much reality TV and confessional celebrity interviews, the public is tired of accessible stars. Who needs them to be 'Just Like Us?' 'Just Like Us' means just as boring as we are.

Almost every media organization is doing something with live events now, and that's because they feel they can break through that way.

Along with all those books about Lincoln, Obama might read some biographies of Napoleon. The general who established the Legion d'Honneur understood that people fought as much for medals as for morals.

American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long, a whole generation gave up on them.

An enormous number of mothers in the U.S. are working double time, graveyard shifts, and more than one job just to put food on the table for their kids.

Any great, long career has at least one flameout in it.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

Back in his Chicago Senate days, when he was seeking greater black credibility, Obama was happy enough to attend the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ.

Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks.

Being president, you may have more power than anyone else in the country, but you quickly discover that you have much, much less than you thought you'd have going in. You're hamstrung in ways you never dreamed of.

Bill Clinton, talking about the need to financially empower wives and mothers in regressive countries, once remarked that women have 'the responsibility gene.' No one has that gene more markedly than his wife.

By the end of 'Game Change,' one feels that the candidates' few happy moments are those when they 'lose it.'

CBS's Ed Murrow may have been over-celebrated as the principled observer for the masses, fair yet unafraid to take on the bullies.

Captain Richard Phillips of the good ship Maersk Alabama - and Sully Sullenberger splashing down his crippled airliner in the Hudson River - broke through the poisonous smog of economic depression and Wall Street skullduggery with a reminder that pure individual heroism is a daily occurrence if we know where to look for it.

Celebrity these days is completely for sale; it's not remotely mysterious. But there's something that remains glamorous and mysterious about royalty.

Clinton passed his first budget without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Before it led to the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, it led to a Democratic defeat in the 1994 midterms.

Corporate communications will become a high-tech art, just as political communication is for Obama.

Disinterested public service has become, just so... what's the phrase, 'old school.'

Does Obama create confusion on purpose?

Economics has become as riveting as politics.

Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies.

Even as the whole world tries to hang on to its job, there is also this weird parallel sense - almost a covert longing - that the old corrupt structures on which that job depends needs to be, ought to be, swept away.

Everyone is someone else's catalyst for selling something these days.

Everywhere you look, there's a hunger to put the ethos by which Wall Street thrives on trial.

Feminism in some ways has become quite dormant.

For Sarah Palin, the least experienced on the world stage, the stress of maintaining the fiction that she was qualified to be vice president sent her over the deep end almost immediately. She went off on a ferocious spending spree that might have killed a lesser woman. Katie Couric's straightforward questions unraveled her.

For a guy who believes in hope, Obama doesn't seem to be able to spread much of it around. How can he? We know too much now about the hollowness of institutions and the frailty of their leaders.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.