MONICA HESSE

I hope people will never stop dressing up as Harry Potter. It feels less to me like something you wear because you think it's a great costume idea and more like something you wear because you really like wearing your Hogwarts robe, and you really only get the one chance per year.

Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.

It's part of the American experience: We deal with mosquitoes in August, airport delays around Thanksgiving, expensive health care and the potential of being shot, at any time, by a semiautomatic weapon as we try to go about the most boring, precious, asinine aspects of our daily lives.

Like a lot of people, I read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' again and again and again when I was growing up - I'm still completely felled by what an astounding book it is. And as a teenager, I did a lot of reading about concentration camps and the vast horrors of the war.

People throughout time have grieved, have fallen in love, have fallen out of love. We are sometimes petty and sometimes heroic, and we have been that way forever.

Cooking is a weird thing. In homes, I'd wager it's still women who do more of the cooking.

When Holly Madison, Hef's former chief girlfriend, came out with a tell-all book about life in the Mansion, the most bizarre revelation was that, prior to the man's infamous orgies, all of the live-in girlfriends were required to put on matching pink flannel pajamas.

I can bend my wrist down to my forearm. I can wrench my fingers backward until they rest on my hand. A hitchhiker's thumb might arc into a 90-degree angle; mine will go to 135.

Long before the writer Gillian Flynn popularized the concept of the insufferable 'Cool Girl,' who doesn't exist except in men's fervent fantasies, Hugh Hefner dreamed her, undressed her, and put her in his magazine.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

I hope people will never stop dressing up as Harry Potter. It feels less to me like something you wear because you think it's a great costume idea and more like something you wear because you really like wearing your Hogwarts robe, and you really only get the one chance per year.

Like a lot of people, I read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' again and again and again when I was growing up - I'm still completely felled by what an astounding book it is. And as a teenager, I did a lot of reading about concentration camps and the vast horrors of the war.

By the end of his life, one has a far easier time picturing Hugh Hefner buying his girlfriend a comfy pair of slippers than one of the satin corsets the Bunnies used to wear.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

It's part of the American experience: We deal with mosquitoes in August, airport delays around Thanksgiving, expensive health care and the potential of being shot, at any time, by a semiautomatic weapon as we try to go about the most boring, precious, asinine aspects of our daily lives.

I can bend my wrist down to my forearm. I can wrench my fingers backward until they rest on my hand. A hitchhiker's thumb might arc into a 90-degree angle; mine will go to 135.

Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.

Cooking is a weird thing. In homes, I'd wager it's still women who do more of the cooking.

People throughout time have grieved, have fallen in love, have fallen out of love. We are sometimes petty and sometimes heroic, and we have been that way forever.

When Holly Madison, Hef's former chief girlfriend, came out with a tell-all book about life in the Mansion, the most bizarre revelation was that, prior to the man's infamous orgies, all of the live-in girlfriends were required to put on matching pink flannel pajamas.

Genes are mysterious things, still unpredictable after all of our research, flecks of humanity that can destroy lives but, just as often, can teach us to appreciate the strange wonder of our existence.

Long before the writer Gillian Flynn popularized the concept of the insufferable 'Cool Girl,' who doesn't exist except in men's fervent fantasies, Hugh Hefner dreamed her, undressed her, and put her in his magazine.