“I'm not the first to admit that raising a child in Park Slope, Brooklyn, can bear an embarrassing resemblance to the TV show 'Portlandia.' My wife and I try to have some ironic distance from the cu...”

“Holiday binge-buying has deep roots in American culture: department stores have been associating turkey gluttony with its spending equivalent since they began sponsoring Thanksgiving Day parades in...”

“I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U....”

“The American dream always meant that anybody willing to put in a hard day's work could make a decent living. That's just not true anymore for people without at least some post-high school education.”

“Statistics is the grammar of science.”

“You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.”

“It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.”

“Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.”

“Dont cry and dont rage. Understand.”

“The only way to heal yourself was to understand. Understand the love or the hate or the cowardice, or the impulsiveness, the lack of will of the one who hurt you--the circumstances that twisted the...”