Editor

What does it take to be a great social chronicler? Perhaps one of the key attributes is an understanding of what it feels like to fall from grace.

The comptroller of New York City ought to have all the characteristics of a major corporation's CFO - quiet rigor, obsessive care for detail, incorruptible judgment, an ability to work assiduously behind the scenes with the key stakeholders.

When Obama heralds another 'teachable moment,' it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.

It's Obama's bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed.

The Duke of York has never remarried.

Corporate communications will become a high-tech art, just as political communication is for Obama.

I don't actually go to newsstands anymore.

Movie stars today are as greedy for additional kids as bankers are for bonuses. It's the new badge of authenticity.

Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton.

'The Daily Beast' competes in the highly Darwinian media world filled with hyper-smart, highly adaptive, tool-using people with opposable thumbs.

It's so thrilling to be intimidated.

More Brazilian women earn Ph.D.s every year than do men.

To win respect, the networks seem to feel they have to keep absurdly overstating their anchors' reporting cred.

The question for Obama is how he can rein in the furies of populism while making us all feel the malefactors of great wealth are being sufficiently punished.

I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print.

The cloud that descended on Black Rock on Monday was not for the past but the future. How much will this debacle chill the pursuit of other risky investigations?

The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet's permission, so is courage.

Periodically, 'The New York Times' runs a business news story lamenting how few women still make it to the top in the Wall Street boys' club. Could it be that women are choosing to be conscientious objectors in these wars of one against all?

One phrase I would dearly like to consign to the can is 'Out of the Box.' The thinking that told us we should invade Iraq and that house prices never decline may have been out of the box, but it put us into the ditch. We have been badly misled by people who persuaded us that they understood things we didn't.

Hillary Clinton has spent her entire career looking bug-eyed with incredulity when an interviewer asks her whatever question she most expects at that moment.