Kitchens are for conversation. They're not just for cooking; they're for conversations.

You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

The hurricane dominated the conversation and the war is no longer on the front burner,

We'll have less and less human interaction, we'll see less conversation at the water cooler, which leads to less inventive thinking.

I write - and then I write some more.

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.