The Osage have this lovely phrase: 'Travelers in the Mist.' It was the term for part of an Osage clan that would take the lead whenever the tribe was venturing into unfamiliar realms. And, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.

I promise not to take my thousands of dollars in student loan debt and move to Mexico. At least not right away.

Millions of people would give literally anything to get their kids into a school like Harvard, and millions more simple admire it as another, brighter world.

I personally can barely remember what I was like before I came to college, what made me happy or worried or confident. I don't remember what I expected in my future, except that 'President of the United States' was about halfway up the ladder.

Many graduates, moving often in the first years of their post-college life, simply forget to update their addresses with Harvard, and so bills go unanswered and uncollected. This is called a 'technical default.'

Miami is the place where all great Medicare fraud schemes come from. It has a great concentration of professional criminals and old people.

When bills come in, Medicare get so many bills every day, it pays most of them and then goes back later to figure out if they were fraudulent, if it ever goes back at all.

It's so hard to cover Trump. What Trump says, what he feels, what he thinks changes from day to day.

Marty Baron, 'The Post's executive editor, stopped me in the elevator lobby late one debate night and suggested we look into the Trump Foundation specifically. I also became interested in researching Trump's broader history of charity.

There's two sides to Trump's character, at least his pre-presidential character. One was, 'I'm the richest man you could possibly imagine, I live the life of Scrooge McDuck.' The other side was, 'I need your money. Give me money.'

The Trump Foundation's tax returns are public. That's one thing. So we can look through them in a way that we can't look through his personal tax returns. They're publicly available going back to the beginning of the foundation, which is 1987.

Don't focus on what Trump says. Focus on the results of his actions. Stay in your lane and focus on one particular area.

Trump called me a 'nasty guy' on the phone, and some of his surrogates called me 'obsessed' and biased on TV.

The trouble with dead people often begins with something called the Death Master File, which is kept by the Social Security Administration. Every day, new reports are added, provided by relatives, funeral homes, and the state agencies that issue official death certificates. The list contains 90 million reports.

There are some things about Trump's foundation and charity that I really want to know. I worry there may not be enough time to figure it all out.

For me, the thing that is different about Trump is that you don't realize it, and I didn't realize it, but there is a rhythm that the political press - including myself - expects people to show in terms of embarrassing statements or shameful acts. And that is spinning it away and finally being forced to apologize, and then apologize again.

Trump is a really complicated story and a difficult candidate to write about.

The biggest correlation you find is with Trump's own personal and business interests. He lives in Palm Beach part of the year, where charity galas are a big part of the life. And he runs a club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, that depends a lot on being rented out by charities, who can pay as much as $275,000 per night to rent out his club.

Trump was on WrestleMania in 2007. And in that year and 2009, the McMahons gave a total of $5 million. Now, we know that wasn't Trump's payment for WrestleMania. He got paid separately, but about the same time, they made this $5 million donation.

Some courts have said moving an employee to a basement or closet usually amounts to punishment. But others have said this is a decision that should be made case by case. How nice is the basement office? How big is the closet?

In theory, it is illegal to make the basement into a bureaucratic purgatory. In 1994, for instance, Congress prohibited agencies from making significant changes in a whistleblower's 'working conditions' as punishment for speaking out.

In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets, and basements. It's a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law. The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your office. So what?

In 1996, Trump had crashed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity opening a nursery school for children with AIDS. Trump, who had never donated to the charity, stole a seat onstage that had been saved for a big contributor.

I read the collected works of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and made a list of everything the old Baptist preacher had ever condemned as immoral or untoward. The subjects of his condemnation ranged from college-age women going braless to dogs wearing clothes to Beyonce.