I regret to inform you you have used your allotted puncutation for the next month. Please refrain from using question marks and exclamation points until further notice. Failure to comply will result in interest charges being applied in the form of further loss of credibility. You appear to be overdrawn there as well, however. If said violations continue, you may be required to forfit your use of vowels.

I stopped reading his column when I realized that any time he wrote about anything but football he showed himself completely incapable of creative thought or understanding. He's a moron who can't seem to follow the simplest concepts in the SF shows he claims to like. Evidently you can be a Brookings "Scholar" simply by parroting whatever imbecilic Right Wing ploy is hot at the moment. His being a Brookings scholar devalues the title as much as Bush has devalued a Yale degree or a Harvard business degree. Who the hell cares if you've got one if they can be simply purchased?

He tells the same jokes over and over and they all seem designed to show you how clever he is. What's the point of giving a team a nickname if you're going to explain it every time you use it? Hey, look, he knows what the symbols on the Steeler's helmets are called. Ooh, someone once told him what Chineese for "bear" is. What a clever guy.

Pat him on the head, give him a cookie and send him off to bed. He is exactly the reason I wish King would write about football more. Easterbrook is so bad he nullifys several other writers, leaving a gaping void in the world of NFL commentary.

This article at its heart is wondering if raising your children as well as you can is enough. That's why she's looking at her kids and wondering. I'd think she looks at the young men at Duke accused of this horrible crime and the young men that were thrown out of the bar in her own experience and likely assumes they all had mothers that loved them too, mothers who did their best. Yet there are still people like this in the world. These events leave her hoping she can do a good enough job that her children turn out to be good people. The article isn't about her thinking her kids will be evil, it is about her wondering if she's a good enough parent, if she can be a good enough parent.

Then I get to the letters and see that many other mothers have failed. It is amazing what some people are reading into this article, the anger, the defensiveness. So much is said of the article or the author that wasn't in the article at all. The hatred, the cries for attention, the way the letter writers show they either have problems with women or with social interaction are all sad. They help illustrate the authors worry that no matter what you do as a parent, there'll always be those that come out wrong or who didn't have the parenting your children did. All you can do is try to steer your kids away from the hateful, from the fearful and from the misanthropic.

Ms. Sullivan, I wish you well in your quest to raise good people. Provide a good example and teach them well. In the end, that's all you can do.

My dog killed sentient beings -- birds, amphibians and mammals I don't want to name

Really? Sentient? So this dog has been put down, yes? Dogs that kill people tend to be put down. Or are you saying your dog somehow got to and killed a gorilla? Or dolphin? Or one of the handful of species that might be called sentient? There's only one we know for sure and that's people. We suspect gorillas and a few others might be. I don't see how your dog would even have access to most of them.

Unless, of course the words doesn't mean what you think it means. I suspect that is the case. At the very least your editor should be asking for clarification on such things. The rest of the article was fine, but this makes me wary about your book. Is it all that sloppy?

Read Bellwether by Connie Willis. This is a much more telling look at what drives fads and brings such things to public awareness. The authors seems to mistake following fads for individuality. This should not be a surprise. Early in the article we read His punk-anarchist-intellectual pose was mostly about "exuding a pretense of cool," and it's now time, he writes with disarming frankness, to "get on with the business of figuring out what and who I want to be."

He's laid it out for us. He was a poser and his mistake is that he thinks everyone else is too. The book is evidently an attempt to show us all that we're all just fakes like him. Sadly he can't see outside his own experience. He doesn't even get to be the Bellwether, he's just another punk poser. He wears the clothes but doesn't understand the ethos. The basic thesis in the article's title and subtitle is wrong. The author of the book was just never enough of an individual to realize it. He likely doesn't even understand what being an individual is.

He seems to think being an individual is about what clothes you wear, what fads you follow and the pretense you put on. His "indictment" of rebellion, individualism and how these have supposedly been co-opted by the establishment shows a basic confustion between individualsim and marketing. He can't see beyond the marketing and doesn't know how to do more than follow. There have always been posers, this is nothing new. People tend to follow, but there are always individuals. This hasn't changed, despite his inability to see beyond himself.