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Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. It was not his fault. He was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk.

His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television.

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven.

I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister's wedding. My sister didn't have a wedding.

I met fred rogers in 1998, when 'Esquire' assigned me a story about him for a special issue on American heroes. I last spoke with him on Christmas Day 2002, when I called him to talk about an argument I'd had with my cousin; he died two months later, on February 27, 2003.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

Fred Rogers was a children's-TV host, but he was not Captain Kangaroo or Officer Joe Bolton. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was so appalled by what he saw on 1950s television--adults trying to entertain children by throwing pies in each other's faces - that he joined the medium as a reformer.

I was a salesman just out of college, traveling all over American roads in the cause of selling handbags to stores that would in turn sell them to American women, not unlike my father had done.

I had heard a lot of stories about my father and celebrities, most of them from his own mouth. In his stories, famous women flirted with him outrageously and helplessly, and famous men sought his company, paid him deference, or took umbrage after being upstaged by him.

I didn't love David Bowie. Sure, I loved a lot of his songs, like everybody else, and, like everybody else, I had an incarnation of Bowie that I loved best - in my case, the solemn 'art-rock' Bowie of the late Seventies.

I love many of the rock and rollers next up on altar of actuarial sacrifice more than I ever loved David Bowie.

Gluttony is harder than it looks. It's listed as a sin, as something you give in to, when really it's a skill, requiring not just hunger but resilience. That's why the most resilient city in the country, New Orleans, is also the most gluttonous.

Now, I love Israeli food, love 'Jerusalem: A Cookbook', love the homey exoticism, the fusion forged in the crucible of an eternally contested crossroads.

For a long time, New Orleans was the classic-rock station of American cuisine, its reputation for flamboyance belying its playlist conservatism.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

There is certainly no want of journalistic ambition among the purveyors of what is now called 'long-form,' nor of novelistic technique brought to bear on nonfiction, nor of outrage.

We are trained to distinguish between journalism that's short and long, that's responsible and irresponsible, that stands for the right values and stands for the wrong.

I forget what I wore for my first encounter with Mark Zuckerberg. I know it wasn't a suit - that would have seemed out of place in the rigorously casual world of Facebook. I probably wore what I usually wear, a pair of jeans and a Gap T-shirt, maybe my black sneakers.

It is hard to decide whether Mark Zuckerberg is the most interesting boring person in the world or the most boring interesting one.

Mark Zuckerberg is the product of Facebook just as surely as Facebook is the product of Mark Zuckerberg.

We love football because the game of football is better than it has ever been, and is somehow managing to attain, at the same time, an apogee of opprobrium and excellence.

I have about 25,000 songs on my computer and play them mostly on shuffle, which means that the songs I've played the most are the songs that have been on my computer the longest.

Music has always enhanced our experience of life on earth by seeming to give us access to something larger than ourselves - the strings of the universe.

Josh Ozersky was a meat man. He knew meat, revered it, studied it, sang it, evangelized it, wrote about it, and, of course, ate it. Lots of it. Life, for Josh, was meat, and writing. Everything else was a side.

By becoming the Twitter police we've volunteered to become the thought police: This seems indisputable, even uncontroversial.

A mob pelting pilloried wrongdoers with rotten vegetables would seem to have little in common with one doing the same with 140-character invective, except of course the most important thing: the belief that they are in the right, and are even doing good by making the object of their contempt feel really, really bad.

When a cocker spaniel bites, it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.

The pit bull is not a breed but a conglomeration of traits, and those traits are reshaping what we think of as the American dog, which is to say the American mutt.

We might accept pit bulls personally, but America still doesn't accept them institutionally, where it counts; indeed, apartment complexes and insurance companies are arrayed in force against them.

You learn a lot about America when you own a pit bull. You learn not just who likes your dog; you learn what kind of person likes your dog - and what kind of person fears him.

We can trust technology to effect change - that's a given.

I was not a fan. Moreover, I reveled in not being a fan, as though not being able to tolerate Robin Williams was one of the things by which I defined myself.

Let's face it: There used to be something tragic about even the most beautiful forty-two-year-old woman. With half her life still ahead of her, she was deemed to be at the end of something--namely, everything society valued in her, other than her success as a mother.

In a society in which the median age keeps advancing, we have no choice but to keep redefining youth.

Conservatives still attack feminism with the absurd notion that it makes its adherents less attractive to men; in truth, it is feminism that has made forty-two-year-old women so desirable.

The child stars who emerged from Disney boot camp and dominated pop culture in the late '90s and '00s are not only still around but also have spawned successors who have proven even more indispensable to the business of music, movies, and television.

Music and television are turning into the equivalent of gymnastics and tennis: sports built entirely around the identification and training of prodigies.

Every artist can make art only from the materials at hand, and many of the child stars who try to mature into artists can make art only from their knowledge - and ours - that they were child stars.

By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.

I don't play guitar. I sing. I'm the lead singer, of Cousin Billy. I also play harmonica, after a fashion.

I wasn't learning to sing because I thought I could; I was learning to sing because I knew I couldn't.

Now, I'm fully aware that there is only one figure more pitiable, more ludicrous, more inherently ridiculous than a bad singer who keeps on singing, and that's a bad singer who keeps on singing because he has issues.

That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.

I'd never met Philip Seymour Hoffman, never knew anyone who knew him, never even read a passably revealing magazine profile of him.

We live in the golden age of character actors - in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas.

Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could.

The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger - the actors who thrill us by going for broke.

Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither.

And what makes Bob Dylan stories interesting is that the only person who can decide their outcome is Bob Dylan, so you never know how they're going to go.

Ask people who know him for a description of Bob Dylan outside the prerogatives of fame and the obligations of art, and they have to stop and think; there's just not that much left.

It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around.

I'm a suit guy. I like wearing them for the sense of completion they offer. I like buying them for the sense of near permanence - the knowledge that whatever I buy will be part of my life for the next ten years or so.

The suits are as similar as uniforms, and yet you can tell their individual qualities by how they respond to movement - the good ones ripple like wheat in a field and provide not a show of monotony but rather a spectacle of plenty.

Wearing a suit can seem like a somewhat archaic gesture, a concession to formality in a determinedly casual age.

A lot of people like to say that they have trouble getting gifts. I have trouble giving them. It's not out of a lack of generosity, mind you. My fallback is to go big, no matter what the occasion.

I am the guilty gift-giver, which means that I am a gift-giver who lacks all sense of proportion.

Like most people, I like to give what I like to get. Unlike most people, I still like to get what I got in college - books, magazine subscriptions, CDs, T-shirts.

My ten-year-old daughter loves gifts. She loves to give them and she loves to get them. She loves to give them when she's hurt her parents' feelings, and she loves to get them when her parents have hurt hers.

Before the Beatles could give us 'The White Album', they had to achieve disorienting success.

I never met Lou Reed, never was one of those journalists lucky enough to be the object of his derision, contempt, condescension, indifference, and occasional piercing honesty.

Every celebrity has become a celebrity because of sex and money. But few celebrities like talking about either sex or money; they would rather talk about ideas, or ideals, or solving the world's problems - all against a backdrop of sex and money.

Of course, Google specializes in coming up with ideas, professes the highest ideals, and is dedicated to solving the world's problems.

Any child can tell you what Google does - Google gives you the answers. But Google doesn't, not really.

Without your data, Google couldn't pursue the dream of trying to figure out what you're really thinking when you're asking a question, of trying to discern, from the imprecision of your language, the exact answer you're looking for.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.

Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.

I am an adoptive parent. My wife and I adopted our daughter nine years ago. She was born in China. We have been her parents since she was nine and a half months old, and we don't know very much about her life before we first took her into our arms.

My mother was not a country girl. She was a Brooklyn girl, born and raised in Flatbush, and then a Long Island girl, who liked shopping, 'a little glitter' in her clothes, and keeping secret the actual color of her hair, which from the day I was born to the day she died, was the 'platinum blonde' of Jean Harlow's.

Now, I was one of those kids who grew up privy to both his parents' secrets, who acted as the intermediary between them and eased their estrangements: that was my function in the household.

The fact is, you can't have Southern friends without eventually wanting to sing with them, and without eventually learning that the only way to sing with them is to make your peace with country music.

I remember George Jones singing on television, but not any of the songs he sang. What I remember was my visceral reaction to him, the intensity of my distaste.

Music subscriptions will eventually replace music collections because the digital universe is oriented against the idea of ownership - because music ownership is itself the eight-track of the Internet.

I always looked askance at Pandora and Spotify, regarding both as a passive means of experiencing music; they feed you music they presume you will like, and eventually you like it.

I collect songs because I want to control what I - what everybody within earshot - listens to.

The main difference between listening to music on a computer and listening to music on vinyl or disc is not sound quality or even portability; it's that when you listen to music on a computer, you listen to music on the same instrument you use to acquire it.

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