Amy’s posterous

By all accounts, watching Twilight is the cinematic equivalent of seeing a turnip shaped like the Virgin Mary: a miracle for the devoted, a punchline for everyone else.

I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up with my other work because it was so much more enjoyable.

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

My tools appear deceptively simple. TextMate. Terminal. Transmit, LaunchBar, DropBox.

No one is pushing for "political correctness" as a decontextualized blindly dogmatic philosophy. What people are pushing for is not pretending that racism and homophobia and misogyny and anti-semitism don't exist, or trying to camouflage these things as "jokes.

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.

SIR – I find it intensely humiliating to be asked by airport security staff if I have packed my own bag. This forces one to admit, usually within earshot of others, that I no longer have a manservant to do the chore for me. Gentlemen should be able to answer such questions with a disdainful: "Of course not! Do I look like that sort of person?"

Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Guildford, Surrey

Freedom, opportunity, respect, dignity, self-determination and equality — those universal human rights we somehow judge optional for women — do not make people unhappy. Only roadblocks to those entitlements do. Particularly when those impediments are packaged as what we “really” want.