To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.

Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.

We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.

In comics, you have to imagine what happens. I really loved it; I loved collecting. I loved following the adventures and figuring out what was going to happen next. I was a huge X-Men fan; I was a huge Spider-Man fan, and, to large degree, I remain one. It's literature for me; it's art.

I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn't realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.

It is rewarding beyond words to rescue a dog from the shelter and have that dog become part of your family.

We had a very upwardly mobile economy, and that peaked around the 1950s when the typical middle-class American family consisted of a father with a job and stay-at-home mom who took care of the kids.

As parents, can we counter the effect of television violence? One worrying feature in Britain is that so many TV sets are in a child's bedroom; this means that the mediating effect of watching with a parent, the ability to discuss and interpret what has been seen, is lost.