It’s hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones. – Nancy Gibbs
Pour a liquid out of its container, and it changes shape, fills the space you give it. If you give children a lot of space, it may surprise you where they’ll go and the shape they’ll take. – Nancy Gibbs
Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How ‘substantial’ does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal? – Nancy Gibbs
Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you’re not looking. – Nancy Gibbs
A lot of camps and summer programs for kids seem to have discovered that among the most valuable things they offer is what they don’t offer. No Wi-Fi. No grades. No hovering parents or risk managers or parents who parent like risk managers. – Nancy Gibbs
What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start. – Nancy Gibbs
Death will never be pretty – its sights and smells too close and crude. And it will never come under our control: it gallops where we tiptoe, rips up our routines, burns our very breath with its heat and sting. – Nancy Gibbs
In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water. – Nancy Gibbs
‘Sesame Street’s’ genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things – death, divorce, danger – in terms that children understand and accept. – Nancy Gibbs
It’s no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets. – Nancy Gibbs
We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames. – Nancy Gibbs
Today’s kids aren’t taking up arms against their parents; they’re too busy texting them. – Nancy Gibbs
Decision making in a democracy depends above all on knowledge and not just the intel available to presidents and policymakers. – Nancy Gibbs
While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests. – Nancy Gibbs
What is it about summer that makes children grow? We feed and water them more. They do get more sun, but that probably doesn’t matter as much as the book they read or the rule they broke that taught them something they couldn’t have learned any other way. – Nancy Gibbs
If anything, the power of the cover of ‘Time’ has increased as the media landscape has atomized. – Nancy Gibbs
As you probably know, I’ve written a lot about the presidency, so it’s obviously exciting when you get to interview a president and write about it. – Nancy Gibbs
Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what’s left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school. – Nancy Gibbs
Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting. – Nancy Gibbs
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright would baptize Obama, perform his marriage to Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, baptize their daughters, and draw him into the raucous, restless family of faith that Obama had never known before. – Nancy Gibbs
Enter politics, and you enter the glass house; there are no secrets and no places to hide. – Nancy Gibbs
Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger. – Nancy Gibbs
The days of the Pentagon Papers debates seem long past, when a sudden transparency yielded insight into fights over war and peace and freedom and security; the transparency afforded by Twitter and Facebook yields insights that extend no further than a lawmaker’s boundless narcissism and a culture’s pitiless prurience. – Nancy Gibbs
Summer is not obligatory. We can start an infernally hard jigsaw puzzle in June with the knowledge that, if there are enough rainy days, we may just finish it by Labor Day, but if not, there’s no harm, no penalty. We may have better things to do. – Nancy Gibbs
Democracy presumes that we’re all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie. – Nancy Gibbs
All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score. – Nancy Gibbs