Anna Quindlen

So I go over to the school to vote in the New York City primary, and I'm in the booth looking at all the names and the levers and the sign at the top that says information for voters, and it's deja vu all over again.

As the wind began to shift northward and the ominous perfume of acrid smoke drifted down to the streets at the other end of the island, as the casualty lists grew longer and the stories of the missing less lined with hope, as the end of the world as we know it entered its postlude, it was the Hansons I fastened on.

Rodi Alvarado Pena cleans houses for a living, thinks about her two children in Guatemala and waits. For six years she has been in the United States seeking asylum, watching her case go back and forth in a flurry of dizzying inconsistency.

George W. Bush and I have been on vacation at the same time, both of us in small towns shimmering in the heat, full of corn fields and, at least in my case, lumbering rodents with powerful suicidal impulses stiffening on the road shoulder.

She seemed to have everything the times demanded, this woman of a certain age toying with her mineral water across a restaurant table. A partnership in a large law firm.

I grew up in a suburb in which neighborhood was defined by parish, in which the smell of fish sticks filled the air on Friday nights and there were more copies of the Baltimore Catechism than of Webster's dictionary.

So a woman walks into a pediatrician's office. She's tired, she's hot and she's been up all night throwing sheets into the washer because the smaller of her two boys has projectile vomiting so severe it looks like a special effect from "The Exorcist." Oh, and she's nauseated, too, because since she already has two kids under the age of 5 it made perfect sense to have another, and she's four months pregnant.

When the Ad Council convened focus groups not long ago to help prepare a series of public-service announcements on child hunger, there was a fairly unanimous response from the participants about the subject.

When the good-old-days crowd get together over coffee in a diner, at the card table at home, one of the things they sometimes bemoan is the end of civics class in school.

Robert Pennoyer registered as a Republican in 1946. He is partial to quoting from a bronze medal given to his father to commemorate the centennial of the party, engraved with a quotation from Dwight D.

This courtroom has a disconcerting decorative duality, like a person dressed only from the waist down. The lower half of the cavernous room has glowing wood wainscoting, and the well is set off by a surround of ornamental spindles.

My mother did not exfoliate. In her medicine cabinet she had a big white jar of Pond's cold cream and a big blue jar of Noxzema. That's as much care and feeding as her face ever got.

Public personification has always been the struggle on both sides of the abortion battle lines. That is why the people outside clinics on Saturday mornings carry signs with photographs of infants rather than of zygotes, why they wear lapel pins fashioned in the image of tiny feet and shout, "Don't kill your baby," rather than, more accurately, "Don't destroy your embryo." Those who support the legal right to an abortion have always been somewhat at a loss in the face of all this.

My high school graduating class had 175 students. Last year the same school had 420 seniors. This bit of biographical data comes to you by way of Charles Andrew Williams.

Six people live here, in a room the size of the master bedroom in a modest suburban house. Trundles, bunk beds, dressers side by side stacked with toys, clothes, boxes, in tidy claustrophobic clutter.

Never watched "Survivor." never will. what's the point? I've eaten bugs inadvertently myself, dozing in the hammock by the pond on a muggy summer evening.

When my children were newborns and I was spending most of my time watching television while nursing, I saw a program with pediatrician extraordinaire T. Berry Brazelton in which he repeatedly stuck out his tongue at an infant on camera.

To lead a national advocacy organization requires a robust constitution and a thick skin. Long hours, hate mail, public opprobrium: it all comes with the job.

Beneath the military blue tent that the Big Apple Circus pitches each holiday season in New York City labors a man named Serge Percelly, who juggles tennis racquets.

Well, kids, it's sure been a wild ride in the middle schools of America these last few weeks. One moment you're studying the Rough Riders or the Tories or the ways in which the cotton gin shaped the economy of the Southern states, and the next--bam!--you're drawing maps of the contested counties of Florida and trying to figure out which court gets to do what.

As electoral events unfolded in Florida he may have felt like the most overlooked man on earth. And yet his essence is always with us. Why did the either/or of this suspended-animation contest feel oddly familiar?

Early morning in the dining room of an elementary school, its tile walls hung with cardboard cutouts of pumpkins and Pilgrims, its air so inert that the faint suggestion of a thousand tuna sandwiches seems to float in the atmosphere like the ghosts of lunches past.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has not shared her cookie recipe with the readers of Good Housekeeping. Anthony Kennedy has yet to appear on the cover of People magazine.

The student occupation of buildings at Columbia University in 1968 remains the zenith or the nadir of all campus protests, depending on your politics. Richard Nixon (he was on the nadir side) warned in its wake that it was "the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of the country."If Mr.

At last official count nearly 500 gay and lesbian couples had been united in civil unions this summer in Vermont. There were flowers, champagne, brides and brides, grooms and grooms.

When they were building that overexposed bridge to the 21st century, Al Gore and Bill Clinton left the liberals behind. The old guard was resurrected for one night at the Democratic convention, waving from the left bank.

Brokaw and Bush, two guys just standing around talking. Shirtsleeves. Sunshine. Fence posts. Cameras. You get the idea. The candidate was hunkered down at the ranch, going mano a mano for a couple of endless, empty minutes with the anchorman.

Imagine that millions of Americans are addicted to a lethal drug. Imagine that the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly ducked its responsibility by refusing to regulate that drug.

This time we got to see it. And seeing it was not pretty, at least unless you were as twisted as the men captured on the videotapes. They were on the hunt in Central Park, and their prey was women, women crying, women screaming, women with their arms crossed over their denuded chests so they would not be as exposed as they felt.

The miasma of sexual detritus that has swirled around Bill Clinton as though he were some grown-up variant of the "Peanuts" character Pig Pen began in earnest on the national stage in January 1992.