Re your headline: Regardless how much customers may enjoy lingering in their stories, Starbucks does not have a soul. It is a corporation. I know what you meant, and this is perhaps a minor point. But one of the great sicknesses of our legal and economic systems (which are, increasingly, the same) is that we treat corporations as having more value than individuals.

This attitude results from a (crooked) legal decision made in, I believe, 1867, granting corporations legal status as entities. It is not a natural way of seeing things.

The anti-intellectualism of Americans generally is no surprise to anyone who does have a brain.

My theory is that the vapid uninformed and generally slobby types are being bred by aliens deliberately, as we raise chickens for the mass market. Both require a highly specialized environment and could not survive in the real world. Both consume tailored diets, chickens of food, Americans of false information.

I feel that the aliens love the taste of human brains fed a diet of nonsense, as many gourmets love the taste of pate from geese force-fed a diet that enlarges and damages the liver.

I think that the concept of the rapture is just preparing all these specially-bred humans for the day when the aliens come to harvest. There will indeed be a bright light in the sky, and the "faithful" will rise up.

But they will not enter heaven; instead, they will be gathered into flying saucers and the aliens will eat their brains.

It may be trite, but I hate Valentine's Day. A completely bogus holiday.

Thanks for the good article. Don't let the fact that people who don't know you try to psychoanalyze you on the scant evidence of a somewhat humorous familiar essay. That's part of the entertainment writers provide. Nothing wrong with allowing a few lonely people to feel superior for a few moments.

Thank you for remembering Roethke. Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one. What saint ever struggled so much, rose on such lopped limbs to new life? And on and on.

One understands low self-esteem. It is a very handy tool for restraining one's innate bumptiousness. Fairly sure as such an accomplished individual you have learned to live with it, so will not utter useless encouragements.

But Greenspan would have been much inferior, of course. Full of CYA and bad prose.

You describe the over-confident beautifully, striding through airports, bellowing into cell phones, attending "inspirational" meetings on making money (a bit oxymoronic, it seems to me), afflicted with less self-doubt than a caribou.

Good work. Thanks.

Faith is not just a matter of belief in the afterlife. "Afterlife" itself may be a misnomer. If time is a creation, such terminology makes no sense. We are mortal not just at death, but at every moment of existence. Death is a boundary to existence, but so is skin. So is the fact that 24 hours is not enough time to do what one needs to in a day.

It is true many religious traditions do not find it necessary to imagine an ultimate god. Ramakrishna said that in the highest form of samadhi, even the gods appear as dreams and phantasms. The essence of faith is trusting that somehow it all works for the good, comes out right, not "belief in" god and an "afterlife."

There is no solid evidence that things do work out. The idea cannot be disproven either, despite the possible horrors of this existence.

Finally if something gives hope and does not cause harm to others and cannot be disproved I see no reason to forbid it, even if it appears to conflict with one's earlier declarations. I respect Ms. Sontag's suffering, but regret she endured it apparently because her intellectual stance forbade her any comfort. It is possible to respect facts and reason completely and yet allow for faith and hope. It is not necessary to deny any of the discoverable truth about existence.

Thanks to Mr. Rieff and the interviewer. A difficult subject handled with tact and appropriate reserve.

As usual, the networks are treating the Republican candidate as a serious option. The way they present John McCain is as a sober man of reason, the litmus for politicians, as though if he just manages to get his constituencies lined up, he will be the candidate mostly likely to be elected.

It just aint so. Either one of the two remaining Democrats will beat McCain like a dog, and combined they will take 60% of the popular vote. We should both pay attention to and ignore the MSM on this matter--pay attention to what is going on, to what sorts of deviousness the Republicans are beginning now (it has always been their style to coopt the argument, to paint their views as standard and reasonable, but they are now clearly neither); and ignore the supposed content, because there is none.

It's a long time to November and we will see a lot of tricks. But Romney couldn't even fool Republicans. McCain will not fool Americans. He is neither conservative nor liberal, but a man who will do anything, cozy up to anybody, to get nominated. Let's hand him a great big disappointment.

And boudin. Can't believe no one has mentioned boudin.

Good grief, ma'am. I can't believe you never heard of squirrel gumbo. It was a staple where I grew up, in Delta Mississippi, where the depression didn't end until 1973. I feature it in my new novel, The Illumination of Elijah Lee Roswell, due out in 2009. Also some NO scenes (from 1951).

I should allow for the Wisconsin handicap, I guess. You're doing really good. Thanks for the work and the information.