Peak TV has resulted in beautiful shows that have nothing in particular to tell us about humanity.

Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story.

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

The desire to abdicate, to give up - for me, that's primal.

A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts.

Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

We do learn a thing or two from art. It may not be the one-to-one instruction of a moral lesson or the rote learning of a grammatical rule or mathematical concept. But the habits of mind art cultivates are important.

Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.

Feminists are disappointed in each other a lot, a natural side effect of being involved in a movement, which naturally implies that progress toward the ultimate goal is the only measure of success and that setbacks are always disasters.

Writing a novel about feminism can be a thankless task.

My parents and I - I'm an only child - are not particularly religious, but I was christened and raised in that vague and characteristically Canadian form of Protestantism known as the United Church.

Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.

Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.

A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

Indeed, there has never been any sort of organised movement of people who take their cats into the outdoors. Of course, the navy often took them on ships, but there they performed a function, mousing for the officers.

It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all.

There are, of course, fat characters in books out there, some of them quite enduring and famous. But they tend to be creatures of young-adult or commercial fiction.

We are reminded repeatedly, often by older men, that western civilization has died on the altar of social media.

A certain kind of person in America loves to note that they're currently soldiering through the latest Pulitzer winner for history, in particular. It connotes a certain gravitas, a connectedness to the literary and intellectual scene that most upwardly mobile professionals in America still desire.

Book awards - in America, at least - are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book.

Trump has been fiercely mocked in the media since the 1980s. But Trump learned from someone to let all the mockery roll off his back, that the negative publicity was still publicity.

Donald Trump is a man who likes to think he has few equals.