"You have never been my enemy. I am very sorry that I have been yours."

"What may seem like good police work, Lisak says, can lead a detective to press victims in a way that yields misleading or false information."

"What if citizenship were not, in fact, guaranteed by birth? What if everyone had to earn it upon turning 18, and renew it every 10 years, by taking an exam? What might that exam look like?"

"I must say, I enjoyed Putin’s semiotics lesson. But would it really be so bad, Vlad, if you occasionally relaxed the world with a joke or two?"

"The conflict between work and family is not gender-specific at all. There will be no specific solutions for guys. There will be no specific solutions for gals."

"Miss Utah USA might be smart and she might not be, but the last thing I'd use to guess at whether she's smart is whether she can answer this kind of question 'correctly.'"

"People do this all the time, and that's because an angled 3D pie chart is an excellent way to lie to you."

"A constituency group to whom the GOP normally pays close attention—religious institutions—is asking for a legislative 'fix' of the Affordable Care Act to make it work as intended."

"This bit of denunciation, worthy of Alexander Pope, took her maybe an hour. Earlier, it might have been half an hour, but the chemo really took it out of her."

"And the quiet hung there before us, then — we waited, afraid to break that beauty, afraid the loss would push its way back in, afraid of whatever would follow until finally, Chester began again, 'What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms?'"

"When a letter cost nine pence, it seemed but fair to try to make it worth nine pence... Now, however, we think we are too busy for such old-fashioned correspondence. We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes."

Steve Thorngate

The Century managing editor is also a church musician and songwriter.

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