Surcharges are the first step down a road that America may not want to travel. Surcharges sound nice when you talk about smokers because everyone hates smokers. But what about all the other bad habits that people have?

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside -- a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

It doesn't matter how you travel it, it's the same road. It doesn't get any easier when you get bigger, it gets harder. And it will kill you if you let it.

We've had a number of cars that have gone off the road into the ditch. It's made travel very, very hazardous.

The fact that companies monitor e-mail is not a secret.

You can't help but sympathize with an employer who's trying to improve the bottom line, but allowing employers to take over everyone's private life to improve the bottom line is just not legitimate.