For me, a really radical position for journalism to take is to stop being cynical. Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre.

Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.

If there was one fact that sent me hurtling off to write 'Politics Lost,' it was when I learned that John Kerry had focus-grouped Abu Ghraib. We knew about the Justice Department memo in June of 2004, and Kerry didn't raise that in any one of his three debates with George Bush.

Bush the Elder's stature as president grows with every passing year. He was the finest foreign policy president I've ever covered and a man who defied his party on tax increases while imposing budget restrictions on the Democrats.

I used to go on chat rooms on AOL, back when those things existed, and argue with believers in evolution and argued with them that it was against God's law to believe in evolution. It was something I believed really personally.

Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past.

I never really had the classic struggle. I had faith.

Charity can be the outward expression of faith and hope.