History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse.

But particularly when the media profess to strive toward objectivity, gatekeepers play a crucial role in helping people navigate the news to make educated political decisions.

Fox News is nothing if not impressive. No matter how harsh the criticism it endures, the network somehow always manages to prove itself even worse than we had previously imagined.

I am deeply devoted to the 27,000 songs I can take anywhere on my iPod Classic as well as the exquisitely engineered MacBook Air on which I typed this column.

Obama, like Carter, is reacting to warning signs by seeking to split the difference between dispirited Democrats and increasingly radicalized Republicans.

The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.

Warren Buffett pays taxes on a smaller percentage of his billions in income than his cleaning lady.

Americans get mad as hell with reasonable frequency but quickly return to their families and sitcoms.

The myth of the liberal media empowers conservatives to control debate in the United States to the point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore.

Over one in five American children is living in poverty, and the number is rising.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

Praying is a prevailing force.

Only when you connect with yourself do you interact with the beyond.

We inhabit a world in which we tend to put labels on each other and expect that we will then march through life wearing them like permanent sandwich boards.

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory.

There's an old blues refrain: I begged for water, you gave me gasoline.

Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.

In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any "intelligent" critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.

I'm in the moment. I'm always in the moment of life.

To run hard after holiness is another way of running hard after God.

If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.