The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.
There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.
All things, when measured in spans of years, seem simple. But human lives do not occur in years but slowly, day by day. A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.
Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses ... Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.
The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time.
No human quality belongs to only one class of person. We all get to be both aggressive and loving. We all get to delight in our careers and revel in our children. We're all kind and brave, soft and hard, sciency and artsy, interested in being looked at and in admiring others' physical form. Everything.
I hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.
Gaming is our cultural bogeyman - we blame it for everything from child obesity to violence to short attention spans. But any explanation that fits every situation ultimately explains nothing.
It's absolutely delightful to get dressed up for a lovely evening, but when it goes from being a fun thing to being a chore, and a chore that men don't have to do, then we need to think about it differently.
Claude Cahun is a fascinating artist - one of the few women to be part of the surrealist movement, she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe took on men's names and made artworks that investigated female identity long before 'The Second Sex' or Cindy Sherman.
We urgently need to address the assumption bound up in our employment laws and custody arrangements that women are the 'natural child carers' and men don't really want much to do with their children.
I hate to be one of those people who forwards links to 'hilarious pictures' or 'brilliant games' to half their contacts database.
Our culture tends to denigrate things that are associated with women. It's OK for women to wear trousers, for example, but not OK for men to wear skirts.
After the novel was published, I came to feel that I couldn't call myself Orthodox anymore. It's so patriarchal, anti-women, anti-gay. There was something about writing 'Disobedience'... it felt like I had put it all in the book. I had done my best by it, recorded what it meant for me. I felt I was done.
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn't know until you set it down.
Let's teach boys at school the personally and economically valuable skills of self-expression and emotional intelligence, of mediation and problem-solving.
The gaming world isn't filled only with violence and depravity. In fact, it's mostly enchanting.
The thing about having true fans, it seems, is that they remain loyal to their idea of what the work meant to them. And that might make them more exacting than the toughest studio executive or publishing boss.
As a gamer, I can't think of anything more annoying for everyone concerned than playing games in a shared living room.
