There's no doubt that Ali wrote a great deal of what he recited.

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.

Bill Buford has been one of the great fiction editors in the history of the magazine, bringing into our pages countless new voices, ... He has an intelligence and an imagination that has made itself known in the magazine all the time, and I know he will do that, too, as a writer.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.