When You Really Want To Say No,

The 1992 Us Olympic Basketball Team Is The Best Sports Team Ever, The Equivalent Of Rounding Up The Greatest American Writers Of The Last Century Or So And Watching Them Collaborate: 'ok, Twain, You Do The Dialogue And Hand Off To Faulkner. He'll Do The Interior Monologue. Hemingway Will Edit - No, Don't Make That Face, You Know You Overwrite. And Be Nice To Cheever. He's Young, But He's Got A Good Ear. Wharton And Cather Can't Play - They're Girls.'

The Pursuit Of Otherness, The Sense That We Are Somehow Different Than Our Brothers And Sisters, No Matter Where We Find Them, Allows For All The Other Great Evils: Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Violence Against Gay People And Against Women.

Jail Sentences Have Many Functions, But One Is Surely To Send A Message About What Our Society Abhors And What It Values. This Week, The Equation Was Twofold: Female Infidelity Twice As Bad As Male Abuse, The Life Of A Woman Half As Valuable As That Of A Man. The Killing Of The Woman Taken In Adultery Has A Long History And Survives Today In Many Cultures. One Of Those Is Our Own.

I Grew Up In The Suburbs Of Philadelphia And One Of The Things I Like To Say Is That One Of The Biggest Impediments I Had To Becoming A Successful Writer Is I Had A Very Happy Childhood.

Ever Since The Evil Empire Turned Out To Be A Collection Of Third-world Countries, Americans Aligned On The Far Right Have Tried To Cast Gay Men And Lesbians As The New Enemy, Calculating Deviants Seducing The Nation's Young, Anti-avon Ladies Selling Sodomy Door-to-door. This Simply Won't Wash. Just As Seeing The Russians Up Close And Personal On Television Humanized Them, So Seeing The Lesbian Grandmother Of Two Little Girls Wearing Her Gold Medal With Pride Makes The Notion Of Otherness, Much Less Deviance, Silly And Ignorant.