Fictionalize catastrophe long enough and the senses are segregated. The real is hard to imagine. All that’s left is immediacy and drama, and within them cliché.

Don’t get too close to Katrina’s aftermath unless you want to, and just maybe you do.

Friends ask what I think of the Iraq war. My answer: Put on the burgers first. Otherwise they’ll burn. Don’t ask where.

The United States is not an authoritarian state, but it's getting into the bad habit of expecting its people not to talk back.

"Others would feel up Betsy Caledonia, who was 13 but had the pellucid skin of an infant. She’d get a dollar for each boy."

You want risk? Try what happened at the Bay of Figs.

When an emergency takes on its own momentum the first losers are invariably personal dignity and civil rights.

There is spectral League of Ordinary Gentlemen available for missions intended to turn the tables on a self-centered culture unable to sense the subtle straying of its suburban young.

Terror, generated by Islamists and others, is a maiming surrogate for big power clashes in an era that has otherwise cancelled them.

“There’s also the matter of possessing women called Nicole, called Penelope, called Katie (the latest is most beloved), and what that means in the primeval canon of testosterone.”

"Mine, says Benedict, will be a papacy of ideas. The Pole was (how just to say it?) too geographical, too physical, too public. It’s hard to always adore so much motion."