Forty Is ... An Age At Which

Forty Is ... An Age At Which People Have Histories And Options. At Thirty, They Had Perhaps Less History. At Fifty, Perhaps Fewer Options.

I Am A Member Of A Small, Nearly Extinct Minority Group, A Kind Of Urban Lost Tribe Who Insist, In The Face Of All Evidence To The Contrary, On The Sanctity Of Being On Time. Which Is To Say That We On-timers Are Compulsively, Unfashionably Prompt, That There Are Only Handfuls Of Us In Any Given City And, Unfortunately, We Never Seem To Have Appointments With Each Other.

Values Are Not Trendy Items That Are Casually Traded In.

Kerry Asks Americans To Look At The Evidence. Bush Asks People To Believe.

Who's Counting? It Was, Of Course, The Minority Who Were Counting. It Always Is. Most Of The Women I Know Today Would Dearly Like To Use Their Fingers And Toes For Some Activity More Enthralling Than Counting. They Have Been Counting For So Long. But The Peculiar Problem Of The New Math Is That Every Time We Stop Adding, Somebody Starts Subtracting. At The Very Least (the Advanced Students Will Understand This) The Rate Of Increase Slows. ... The Minority Members Of Any Group Or Profession Have Two Answers: They Can Keep Score Or They Can Lose.