I have a friend, an underground playwright, who hates Obama. He’s convinced that, six months after Inauguration, nobody’s going to notice anything different from the past eight years of George W. Bush’s administration — we’ll be paying just as many taxes, our troops will still be mired in war, and everything will be much the

The first time my daughter cried, I was so blown away that I almost forgot to do something about it. It was the most amazing thing on earth. Her eyes, huge and blue—not like anyone’s in my family, but like a glossy, full-blown photocopy of my wife’s—they ordinarily took up half the space on her