Scott Simon
Despite the reams of paperwork, obstacles worthy of a horse show, and a wait that can rival an elephant's gestation, adoption feels no different on the inside.Collection: Horse
Race, blood, lineage, and nationality don't matter; they're just the way that small minds keep score. All that matters about blood is that it's warm and that it beats through a loving heart.Collection: Heart
So: this is where we are going to become parents. You walk into the building as a couple, and leave a few minutes later as a family. You walk in recollecting long romantic dinners, nights at the theater, and care-free vacations. You leave worrying about where to get diapers, milk, and Cheerios.Collection: Couple
Senator Sanders, of course, has campaigned for Hillary Clinton. But what about his legions of supporters?Collection: Clinton
There are times when the adoption process is exhausting and painful and makes you want to scream. But, I am told, so does childbirth.Collection: Adoption
Reading will put you into the minds and hearts of others. It might help you understand why other people do what they do sometimes.Collection: Reading
I take Charb's point, but at some point has Charlie Hebdo been trying to have it both ways because some of what they do is not funny.Collection: Charlie Hebdo
Fidel Castro rhetorically championed the poor. He also held the Cuban economy in a kind of arrested state. He called for racial equality but often cracked down - but did crack down on the press and dissidents and Cuban gays.Collection: Gay
Almost every continent in the world, including our own, has refugees. But how often when we hear the word do we pause to remind ourselves what being a refugee means?Collection: Mean
In journalism, when we want to get a story over the jumps, we refer to it as a universal experience, but it almost never is. There is one universal experience, that's death. That is something we are all going to experience at some distance in the lives of loved ones, strangers and friends, people around us and certainly our own.Collection: Distance
One of the reasons we think this market will start to run out of gas at some point is that you've essentially created as much gold from straw as you can from this financial alchemyCollection: Running
Fidel Castro was a charismatic revolutionary and a ruthless leader who allowed no dissent.Collection: Leader
When they mention great little things in life, they usually forget flossing.Collection: Things In Life
Srebrenica's not simply another reminder of man's inhumanity to man, but how intelligent people can always come up with intelligent reasons to do nothing.Collection: Intelligent
It's not the cost (although that pinches), or the time (though that grinds). After a while, it's the sheer galling indignity of being asked to prove, pay, and prove all over again that you're a worthy parent. Any true parent will tell you that that is impossible to prove in advance.Collection: Parent
As the race for president tightens, Hillary Clinton's campaign hopes to win over millions of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries.Collection: Winning
Janis Joplin didn't just sing a song, she took it over. She swallowed it whole, then sent it back through her gut and her heart.Collection: Song
Adoption is rewarding. But the process, as we have already detailed in some particulars, can be expensive, exhausting, and hard to sustain on a dream, much less a whim.Collection: Dream
Murder is easy. Comedy is hard.Collection: Comedy
Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton, but he won more than 12 million votes in the primaries and was respectfully and elaborately saluted by Hillary Clinton, whom he has endorsed.Collection: Presidential
I've always been passionate about what I do and want to do it well, ... My wife says she's a widow to the computer.Collection: Wife
I know end might be near as this is only day of my adulthood I’ve seen my mother and she hasn’t asked, ‘Why that shirt?’Collection: Mother
Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseat of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can't two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devotion come up with enough chromosomal matter to stick together and create a child?Collection: Girl
Believe me, those great death bed speeches are written ahead of time.Collection: Believe
Imagine the talented love-child of Andr Previn and Lucille Ball.Collection: Children
AR-15s, in particular, are often called America's gun. They're some of the most popular rifles in the country, especially when it comes to sports shooting.Collection: Sports
Exactly who is this God character who is said to be all-powerful yet needs to hire lawyers to take us to court? Isn't he miffed when someone he had always considered to be a true follower turns to the legal system rather than to prayer? Why would the faithful risk making God look ridiculous by losing a trial on Earth when he is certain to win every trial in heaven?Collection: Powerful
Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.Collection: Knowing
Charlie Hebdo were the licensed anarchist clowns of the society.Collection: Charlie Hebdo
Charlie Hebdo mocked everyone. They mocked the left. They mocked the right. They mocked, above all, the extreme right, the extreme right of Le Pen's. If anything could identify their politics, they were kinds of anarchists.Collection: Charlie Hebdo
Charlie Hebdo was and is not The Onion or "The Daily Show." This is a different kind of satire. Might I put it this way - less politically correct.Collection: Charlie Hebdo
I became a pedant of the form. I did my graduate work in art history and particularly in the history of French satirical cartooning. And that made me aware of what a rich and resilient tradition this seemingly scabrous sacrilegious magazine still represented in French life.Collection: Art
I was a kid and it was kind of scabrous, and it wasn't the sacrilege that bothered me so much as the obscenity that challenged a 14-year-old American. But over the years, I came to have a keen appreciation of Charlie Hebdo and what it did.Collection: Appreciation
Fidel Castro takes up so much space in the Cuban mind. It's hard for us to imagine as Americans - isn't it? - how much of everyday conversation he's dominated for 50 years.Collection: Years
In the wake of the deaths of the satirists, Je suis Charlie, I am Charlie, became a slogan of solidarity for free expression around the world.Collection: Expression