There are generations of people who don't know how to eat properly.

I won't go anywhere near the new Times Square. It's seizure-inducing.

In 'The Odyssey,' every feast is extremely ritualized; high-status individuals even get a better cut of meat.

My grandmother died when my mother was just 11 years old, and consequently, my mother never learned how to cook particularly well.

Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women.

There's something to be said for an author who clearly respects a reader.

Young adult novels don't shy away from the discussion of weight issues, and 'Blubber,' the tale of an overweight, not-so-sympathetic fifth-grader bullied by her peers, is a refreshing take.

Food and love are all intertwined at our core level. It can be a very nurturing, wonderful, loving thing.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.

The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they've been politically repressive.

If you work for Google or Apple, stock options give you a chance to share in the increasing value of the company. In the N.F.L., nothing like this happens; the players, though rich, are just working stiffs like the rest of us.

Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.

Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.

Solyndra's failure isn't a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubble means that venture capital should steer clear of tech projects.

If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.

Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices.

A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.

Being out of a job can erode people's confidence and their sense of possibility; and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.

Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you'd expect. Aside from the obvious harm - poverty, difficulty paying off debts - it seems to directly affect people's health, particularly that of older workers.