After eight years of fighting, and multiple rounds of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, my mother lost her battle with cancer. I think about her every day. I miss her terribly, and wish she were there to walk me down the aisle at my wedding and to cheer when my sister received her college diploma.

When I first sat down with my oncologist the day before Thanksgiving, and she told me I would need 8 rounds of chemo, one of my first questions admittedly was: 'Will I lose my hair?' It sounds shallow, I know, but it was a very scary image to me.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

I'm in total sympathy with Dick Smith's sentiments; I only wish there were grounds for saying we Australians would never tolerate such appalling treatment of refugees being carried out in our name.

America's strength is not our diversity; our strength is our ability to unite people of different backgrounds around common principles. A common language is necessary to reach that goal.

Zealous men are ever displaying to you the strength of their belief, while judicious men are showing you the grounds of it.

Sports is something that transcends generations, transcends backgrounds, cultures, races. And so the power of sports is real.

I found that a whole series of people opposed me simply on the grounds that I was a woman. The clerics took to the mosque saying that Pakistan had thrown itself outside the Muslim world and the Muslim umar by voting for a woman, that a woman had usurped a man's place in the Islamic society.

Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.

So much of the language that surrounds us - from things like economics, management theory, and the algorithms built into computer systems - appears to be objective and neutral. But in fact, it is loaded with powerful, and very debatable, political assumptions about how society should work and what human beings are really like.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly romantic, love is the key element. I really love to play with different musicians who come from different cultural backgrounds.

Mapping does not purport to create an idealistic vision where all teachers agree, love one another, and gather around a campfire and sing 'Curriculum Kumbaya.' What it can develop is a sense of place, of respect, and of new grounds for discussion, disputes, and direction.

Sexuality surrounds us like a dangerous aura. The same reverence that is given to the spirit is not given to the flesh. We have had a sexual revolution, but the sexual revolution only has made sex more pervasive. It hasn't granted the level of reverence and respect that it should have.

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I had a PET scan, and it was cleared. Not one cell of cancer after three rounds of chemo. But I still had seven more just for safety, which was stupid. I should have just worked on therapy.

Late August still feels like summer here in the Ozarks, but it is the time of year the nighthawks are moving on to their South American wintering grounds.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.'

I believe that properly regulated research in stem-cell biotechnology will lead to many valuable improvements in medical treatment and that objections on religious or ethical grounds should be vigorously opposed.

Scientists should not do animal testing if there is any alternative, but subject to that, I would support it on grounds of the medical benefits.

Procedures outside the stadiums and in the parking areas still need to be optimized, for example so that emergency medical services can leave the grounds on their way to the hospital faster.

The logic is often far-fetched - how does medical marijuana affect interstate commerce? - and some conservatives would like judges to start throwing out federal laws wholesale on commerce clause grounds. The court once again said no thanks.