What stores are around, what stores aren't around, what advertisers want to present as an ideal woman or man, passing prejudices, things that you would never say now that you could say then.

The masculine man says 'No' to a woman calmly. The Asshole says 'No' to a woman in an angry tone.

The best present a man can give a woman is his undivided attention.

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.