We are going to have a huge jump, (where) one in four is going to be over 60. The demographic shift . . . translates into enough revenue to be industry-changing for a number of U.S. manufacturers.

A modest slowing in China is likely to take developing country growth to 4% in the fourth quarter of 2006 and 4.2% in the first half of 2007. Growth is then projected to rebound to 4.5% in the second half of 2007 as the Chinese economy recovers.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, 'A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.'

But I really feel strongly that our kids do way too much homework. The research is on my side. It's easy to make a fuss when you're right. That can be the tagline of my life: 'It's Easy To Make A Fuss When You're Right.'

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.