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Calling Rand Paul 'the most interesting man in politics' is an invitation to an argument - but one we suspect he'd love to have.
Nancy Gibbs
We will never know if any other president approached Nixon in paranoia, profanity or potential criminality, since only his conversations were captured, subpoenaed and ultimately released on the front pages of newspapers.
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.
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.
There's a smartphone gait: the slow sidewalk weave that comes from being lost in conversation rather than looking where you're going.
The crossroads of science and politics is a dodgy place.
There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.
Enter politics, and you enter the glass house; there are no secrets and no places to hide.
Right now, doctors can test for about 2,500 medical conditions, but they only can treat about 500 of those. So what do you do with the knowledge about the others?
My husband and I don't have sons, so we never had to ask ourselves how we'd have felt about them playing football.
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
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.
In design as in life, smart can also mean wise, kind, inspiring - and cost-effective. And that has a charm all its own.
'Sesame Street's' genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things - death, divorce, danger - in terms that children understand and accept.
Runners exalt the marathon as a public test of private will, when months or years of solitary training, early mornings, lost weekends, rain and pain mature into triumph or surrender. That's one reason the race-day crowds matter, the friends who come to cheer and stomp and flap their signs and push the runners on.
While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.
The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change does not come naturally.
Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger.
Sometimes justice is at its most merciful when it's blind.
The real luxury travel of the modern age is not through space; it's through time.
Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.
If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe.
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.
Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.
Power is not just political. It can be cultural; it can be spiritual.
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Years later, nothing makes me more grateful as a parent than my daughters' encounters with classroom wizards.
Our children will outwit us if they want; for when it comes to technology, they hold the higher ground. Unlike other tools passed carefully and ceremonially from one generation to the next - the sharp scissors, the car keys - this is one they understand better than we do.
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.
There was a time when researchers imagined that Plan B, or the morning-after pill, might become not an emergency form of contraception but a routine one; women would take it once a month to induce a period and never even know whether they had gotten pregnant.
On the court, Jason Collins is not a huge basketball star, but he has already claimed his place in civil rights history as the first openly gay athlete to play in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues.
Sure, we want to know what a president believes in... but that doesn't always mean he should tell us.
The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.
The leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19 worldwide is not accident or violence or disease; it is complications from pregnancy. Girls under 15 are up to five times as likely to die while having children than are women in their 20s, and their babies are more likely to die as well.
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.
There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.
As long as people have been making little people, they've wanted to know how not to.
A runner's stride is not perfectly efficient.
A lot of camps and summer programs for kids seem to have discovered that among the most valuable things they offer is what they don't offer. No Wi-Fi. No grades. No hovering parents or risk managers or parents who parent like risk managers.
It's always been a luxury to be able to hop a plane to Paris, to Venice, to the Grand Canyon.
The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.
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.
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.
Few Westerners know Iran as well as Robin Wright: her first trip there as a journalist was in 1973, and she has covered every important milestone since, from the Islamic revolution and the hostage crisis to the more recent staring contest with the West over Tehran's nuclear program.
George W. Bush, though a president's son, is cast as Reagan's heir even more than his father's.
I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' But Valentine's Day leaves me cold.
High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others.
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.
In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.
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