Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure.

Magazines at some point become hostage to their own success.

Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.

Moping is an unattractive attribute in a man.

Most of us have learned the hard way that there are very few things you can absolutely count on in life.

My hunch is that pop culture began to stagnate the moment Americans started to love the past more than they did the future.

People think they have to be ambitious. But at a certain age, all you want is to be around nice, decent people.

Stationery is addictive. I get mine made in Paris at Benetton, and writing on it gives me a strange thrill.

Television has the obvious benefits of regularity and intimacy.

The shelf life of a movie actor or actress is so short, it's like milk.

There's probably a half-dozen movie actors I really like. But a lot of them just aren't that interesting.

To a young kid growing up in Canada, America seemed to be crazy about the future; dazzled by it.

Water-boarding can result in damage to the lungs and the brain, as well as long-term psychological trauma.

We really care about photography at 'Vanity Fair.'

You have to give kids something to rebel against. You can't like their music - you have to call it noise. It's incumbent on a parent.

You lose manufacturing jobs, you rarely ever get them back again.

A workday lunch that lasts as long as a transcontinental flight is an impossibility for all but the most pliant and footloose of food tourists. To get in the game, you need a thick wallet, an adventurous palate, and a whole lot of time.

Americans who grew up in the 1930s or 1940s still have some fleeting memory of what the country was like before it became the steroidal superpower it is today.

Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations. No sirree. Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state. In fact, in a leader, it's a lethal cocktail.

As any editor will tell you, startling newsroom revelations are generally met with queries about where the information came from and how the reporter got it. Seriously startling revelations are followed by the vetting of libel lawyers.