I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.

I went to a football school, which meant that I went to a university that served up education and was simultaneously operating a sports franchise.

I've tried a lot of different apps to manage Twitter on my phone (I use Hootsuite on my laptop), but I think the official Twitter app is really good.

In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.

It is hard to imagine Thomas Kinkade as anything less than supremely self-assured.

Keeping animals, I have learned, is all about water. Who even knew chickens drank water? I didn't, but they do, and a lot.

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know.

On the very same day that I ordered an iPad 2, I went shopping to buy myself a letter opener. I like to cover all my bases.

Oversized houses, like oversized cars, seem to be a particularly American fixation.

Unlimited choice is paralyzing. The Internet has made this form of paralysis due to option overload a standard feature of comfortable modern life.

When a machine can do something better and faster than a person can, I am happy to let the machine do it.

Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it's a good story or just a seductive one?

You can find out anything you want about a car now, and especially every bit of information about the price, without relying on the dealers.

I had never considered using a hashtag anywhere other than on Twitter, but now I'm inspired. Text messages have always seemed a little flat to me, so the murmuring Greek chorus of a hashtag might be a perfect way to liven them up and give them a bit of dimension.

I rarely listen to commercial radio, and when I do, I'm shocked by how many ads there are, and how annoying they are, and how bad the radio station usually is.

I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.

I want to let my friend Buster know that I would like to have dinner with him tonight. Does Buster work at home? Then how likely is he to have his cell phone on? Is he one of those people who only turns on his cell when he's in his car? I hate that.

Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.

They will be given as gifts; books that are especially pretty or visual will be bought as hard copies; books that are collectible will continue to be collected; people with lots of bookshelves will keep stocking them; and anyone who likes to make notes in books will keep buying books with margins to fill.

When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity; only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went down, unless you were flamboyant with your spending. Then phone calls became as cheap as dirt and as constant as rain, and I was on the phone all the time.