"Extraction companies are buying up the rights to drill on private property with unprecedented speed. At stake are geysers of money. And in the thousands of cases in which the landowner is of the Amish faith, their business partner would never dream of taking them to court should things go awry."

"New to the church's ministry are the dental and ophthalmologist clinics."

"Gathered here are images from the past several days of those affected by these continuing floods."

"In March, Maria and her teachers were celebrating acceptance letters to five colleges and two prestigious scholarships, including one from Dave Eggers' writing center, 826 Valencia. But on the big state tests—the days-long multiple-choice exams that students in California take once a year—Maria scored poorly."

"The decision to take the same surname is one way same-sex couples are rehabilitating—repurposing, you might say—some of the most ancient marital traditions."

"Austerity has failed as economics, but lives on as politics."

"The fully imagined place that Berry’s fiction ushers us into is not simply a geographical location."

"I was surprised by was how proud these idiots were of their ignorance, by printing their names next to their comments."

"In Corinthians, Jesus tells the crowds..."

"In this column I will embed my own nostalgia for the time and place in which I grew up within a framework of someone else's compelling (if simplistic) narrative, and then offer sweeping, general prescriptions for our societial ills."

"I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. I could tell because the RNC Chairman said I wasn’t his best friend anymore. He said that undecided women are his best friend, and that Hispanics and gays are his next best friend, and that red-blooded Americans are only his third best friend. 'I hope you lose a bunch of Governorships,' I said."