There are two classes of people in the world, observed Robert Benchley, "those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not." Half of those who divide quote Benchley and his fellow aphorists. The other half prefer proverbs. And why not? The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general. A proverb is anonymous human history compressed to the size of a seed. "Whom the ...

Excess consumption is practically an American religion. But as anyone with a filled-to-the-gills closet knows, the things we accumulate can become oppressive. With all this stuff piling up and never quite getting put away, we're no longer huddled masses yearning to breathe free; we're huddled masses yearning to free up space on a countertop. Which is why people are so intrigued by the 100 Thing Challenge, a grass-roots movement in which otherwise seemingly normal folks are pledging to whittle down ...

The best thing about cloud computing is that word: cloud. Telling consumers their data is in the cloud is like telling a kid his dog has gone to doggie heaven. There is no doggie heaven, and your data isn't in a cloud. It's in a windowless, fortress-like data center somewhere in the rural U.S. Cloud computing is just a buzzword companies use to describe what they're doing when they move data and processing tasks you're used to hosting on your ...

I always believed I was special, thanks to both Mr. Rogers and my own giant ego. Sure, I knew there were other Joel Steins in the world, but I figured none of them were desperately trying to vie for the public's attention by revealing personal details in rhymed couplets. So when a friend told me that a singer-songwriter named Joel Stein has the website joelstein.com I experienced a profound identity crisis. An identity crisis in that I wanted to make ...

Barack Obama's autopen does not sleep. So, unlike the President, who was roused from a hotel bed recently at 5:45 a.m. in a French resort town to approve a last-minute extension of the Patriot Act, the machine never missed a wink. As the minutes ticked toward midnight on May 26 in Washington, Obama wrote a document authorizing an immediate phone call from the hotel hallway to the White House, where, in an undisclosed room in the building next door, the ...

For Anwar Ibrahim, redemption must be feeling pretty sweet. On Aug. 26, the Malaysian opposition leader won a landslide victory in a local by-election, a political comeback for the former deputy prime minister who has been out of office for the last decade. "We won! And our victory is decisive and overwhelming," an exhausted Anwar told thousands of supporters gathered outside a ballot counting center several hundred kilometers north of the capital that night. Taking over 31,000 ...

"I'm very, very sorry to say that my business is skyrocketing," the personal-finance guru Suze Orman said one late January afternoon. The Dow was down almost 200 points, and Orman was lounging on the terrace of her San Francisco town house, wearing a leopard-print tunic and cowboy boots. She looked up and popped a grape into her mouth. "This is happening because of the lies and deceit and greed of Wall Street, the mortgage companies, the SEC, the Administration," she ...

While the high visibility of my public life has not always brought me personal peace and happiness, it has lent a certain universal quality to my various metamorphoses. Because I believed that to be loved I had to be perfect, I moved "out of myself"--my body--early on and have spent much of my life searching to come home ... to be embodied. I didn't understand this until I was in my 60s and started writing this book. I have come ...

Perhaps it's the dignity of the office that restrains Shimon Peres. Perhaps it's personal decorum. But on the morning after Israel's Prime Minister delivered a speech that all but threw a padlock on the already shuttered peace talks, the country's President offered only the most oblique criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu — and of Israeli politics that long ago stopped being as audacious as the state Peres helped to found. "Leaders must go ahead even when moving ahead is ...

The first time I tried shark-fin soup was at Time Warner's annual dinner in Hong Kong, a few weeks after I had moved to the city. A server came to our table with a cluster of small white bowls, which a few of my colleagues politely declined. I knew the soup had a whiff of controversy around it, but I hadn't yet formed a personal policy, so I gave it a try. I found it underwhelming. The ...