Still, she has already arrived at RL, the clubby restaurant attached to Michigan Avenue's flagship Polo store, when I get there for our appointment. She has not, of course, taken a seat at our table -- the one that magically became available when I dropped her name in making the reservation -- but is, the host tells me, "visiting."

Nearly everyone in the crowded dining room seems to know Sugar, or to want to, so she flutters happily between the tables, offering smiles and personal greetings and more than a few of those oddly charming air kisses one generally associates with high society.

Rautbord glides over to our table, still greeting and being greeted, and, once she sits, fixes her wide-eyed gaze on me.

I've come with a long list of questions, most of which are variations on the theme of "What is a socialite? How does one become one? What does one actually do?"

But Rautbord, whose name and visage have graced Chicago's society pages for slightly longer than she would care to acknowledge, isn't terribly interested in this topic. At 50-something, she is, she says, "very content to get off the stage" of the city's highbrow social scene.

She would rather discuss her life as a businesswoman. The president, owner and guiding spirit of Sugar Rautbord Public Relations Inc., Rautbord has made an industry of what she once simply thought of as her life.

"What, exactly, does the firm do?" I ask gently.

"Basically," she says, pausing a bit to find exactly the right words, "the kind of firm I have . . . it keeps you in the mix."

"So," I continue, referring to her morning meeting with the aforementioned Ivanka and Donald Jr., "the Trumps . . ."

An acting sponsor

"They're going to become more engaged in Chicago civic life," she says, mentioning several charitable and cultural endeavors the sibling real estate developers might underwrite.

Rautbord is acting as a sort of social sponsor for The Donald's grown children, making introductions and generally smoothing things along. She seems to say that she is being paid for this service, though the details are necessarily hazy, given the tackiness of talking about such things. Still, it is important to her that this is a professional endeavor.

"It's the kind of thing that if you did it informally," she says, "you wouldn't be taken seriously."

This is a slightly fraught moment for high society. In recent years, the "well-dressed volunteers" -- Rautbord's definition of a socialite -- who organize charitable benefits and throw important parties have come to include more and more women with professional credentials, if not actual careers. And, at the same time, the very work they used to do for free -- raising funds and organizing social networks -- has come to be viewed as a kind of professional service, available to anyone with a big enough wallet.

So, when Rautbord discusses the enterprise she calls "my little company," she treads a careful line.

"I have been involved with a lot of -- what do you call them? gentlemen? suitors? beaus? -- who were pretty serious industrialists," she says, almost modestly, before asking the waitress for a Cobb salad with no dressing or chicken, but plenty of bacon. "And they were frequently interested in meeting other people I knew, like journalists and political figures."

She pauses for a moment, making sure I am catching her meaning. "There comes a moment," she says, "when the orchid plant [as thank-you gift for making such an introduction] is not sufficient, so you either want a piece of the deal or you want to be paid somehow."

For Rautbord, that moment has clearly arrived.

"I've lived in the quote-unquote society world for a long time," she says, "and it was wonderful. But now I'm more comfortable in a business context."

'It's time'

As it happens, this change of attitude overlaps nicely with acknowledging that she has passed her 50th birthday.

"I can still be the writer," says Rautbord, who has penned three novels and is currently at work on a nonfiction project celebrating women in their 50s, "and I can still be the businesswoman, the mother, wife ... but I can't be the mistress anymore."

Rautbord, a divorced mother of a grown son, begins to tell me about the time when she first saw her own mother, a stunning beauty who had long dyed her prematurely gray hair, with her hair uncolored.

"One day," she remembers, "she just decided that it was time to be gray ... I think that moment was very important to me, like I walked in and my mom was totally gray and she was just like, 'It's time.'"

Absentmindedly tossing back her own blond tresses, Rautbord says, "Lately, a lot of people have been saying to me, 'How come you weren't at this party or this ball?' Well, it's like my mother said, 'It's time.'"

She returns, then, to talking about her clients, the young Trumps, "You know," she says, "it's really their time."

And though I know I'm supposed to react with relief, even joy, at the news of this return to a simpler, lovelier fashion sensibility, instead I find myself griping about it.

In an ad campaign featuring the timelessly beautiful Audrey Hepburn, the Gap has decreed that the skinny black pant is back.

But, really, did anyone miss the skinny black pant? Had anyone even noticed its absence?

Have there been great sighs of relief from tall, thin women -- that incredibly underserved fashion demographic -- as billboards have gone up all over Chicago to announce that the Gap has revived a style of trousers that looks good on approximately 1 percent of the population? Did the Audrey Hepburns of the world just not have enough fashion options?

It happens every autumn, during what we once thought of as "back to school" season and now has evolved into a migratory series of "Fashion Weeks" around the globe. One ridiculous item -- the poncho, the flannel wool capri -- comes to symbolize a year's worth of bad judgment and false hopes.

Occasionally, and without explanation, this item -- Ugg boots, anyone? -- will become a genuine phenomenon, a trend that defies its own silliness and takes root with otherwise sensible people who promised themselves last time -- tapered leg jeans -- that they would never again buy into the hype.

Every season, every fashion magazine runs the same story, the one that advises you to buy only classic clothes, to avoid trends and stick with what's comfortable and flattering for you. Every woman reads that story. And promptly ignores it.

Because, surrounded as it is by a zillion pages of glossy, fabulous pictures of glossy, fabulous models, the follow-your-own-instincts article feels like a lie.

Or worse: a copout.

We don't want to admit that fashion -- or music, or trendy cuisine, or broadcast television -- has passed us by. It's a marketing-driven world, and if we're not buying what the magazine ads are selling, we're not really in the swing of things anymore. One day, you're deciding that skinny pants are hopelessly unkind to your hips, and then, before you know it, you're on the couch watching the network news, wondering why all the commercials are pitching pharmaceuticals and adult diapers.

It's a slippery slope from classic clothes to an elastic waistbanded life and, from there, to the modern American equivalent of death: consumer irrelevance.

Fashion, like sex and fat, is apparently very different in Europe.

It is both more artful and more connected to daily life. It is less obsessed with youth and more broadly embraced as a legitimate form of personal expression. And, somehow, weirdly, despite the annoying truism that French women do not, in fact, get fat, European fashions tend to be designed to suit a variety of right-around-average body types, rather than simply those at the smallest end of the spectrum.

(In America, even our plus-size clothes are simply larger versions of stuff originally designed for tiny bodies. How else would one explain leather miniskirts in size 22?)

'Lifelike' models?

In this spirit of tasteful realism, models with body-mass index ratios below 18 -- 125 pounds for a 5-foot-9-inch woman -- were banned from the runways at Fashion Week in Madrid. And other European cities have threatened to follow suit, insisting on healthier -- the phrase "more lifelike" comes to mind -- bodies to show off the clothes people will be wearing this season as they drive fuel-efficient cars and eat small, well-balanced meals.

This sort of rule-making is, of course, profoundly un-American. We're not the sort of country to tell people what they can and can't do with their bodies -- except, ahem, in certain areas -- and we're certainly not in the business of censoring what consumers see on the open market. If designers want to show clothes on stick figures or dead movie stars or barely recovered junkies, well, who are we to stop them?

The fatter we get, the skinnier we aspire to be. Or maybe it's vice versa.

So we worship our skinny models and their skinny pants, even as we grumble about the unattainable standard they set for the rest of us.

But, in the back of our minds, we wonder if maybe those wacky Europeans aren't doing something right, after all. There do seem to be a lot more people over there comfortably fitting into the skinny black pant.

I am. Really.

My days are just . . . a little different right now.

First, I stand in awe of any situation that is humbling enough to move me off of one of my long-and-closely-held opinions. Right now, I'm backpedaling so fast, and on so many topics, that my heels have worn down.

There's the sleep thing: I've always been a person who needed very little sleep to begin with. And, beyond that, I've always approached the question of sleep with a certain amount of discipline: lights off, quiet room, good pillow . . . assemble all the components in the right way and a good night's rest is yours. My parents proudly claim to have had baby me sleeping through the night at three months old and I've never seen any reason to question either their story or their method. I planned to have my kid doing the same thing before the end of my maternity leave.

Instead, without even being born yet, the kid has decided to show me who's boss. And, through an impressively elaborate combination of kicks, wiggles, jabs to the bladder and/or other internal organs, baby has made it known that, from now on, sleep happens in two-hour shifts. With breaks in between. Not necessarily at night.

All logical explanations about the need to work, meet deadlines, etc., have been ignored.

Then there's the whole mood/hormone thing. This has never been a hugely popular stance with friends, but I pretty much don't believe in PMS and other such phenomena. My basic stance is this: if you're going to be bitchy, be bitchy. Don't make some hormonal excuse about it. The whole my-wacky-female-body-chemistry argument is too easily used against us. We're all adults and we ought be able to manage our emotional responses to things, or at least hold in the tears until we get to the bathroom.

But, pathetic as it is, my emotions of the last few weeks have been -- quite literally -- text-book predictable. I've cried about having ants in our kitchen. And about the fact that the nursery STILL isn't painted. Each of which is specifically mentioned as a typical "nesting instinct" response to this phase of pregnancy. I find it incredibly annoying to have feelings that are so outside my normal emotional range, but, even worse, are so utterly trite.

I'm still kind of wrangling with the potential biology-is-destiny/no-it-isn't-dammit aspects of all this.

As a matter of principle, it's important to me to believe that pregnancy is, in a certain sense, no big deal. Nothing that should preclude me from doing my job and living my life as I always have. In physical practice, that is much harder than I would have expected.

I'm in pretty much the gold standard situation -- a physically undemanding job with flexible hours, supportive bosses and fine (if very pricey) health care -- and I find myself very close to requesting special dispensation for office napping. At this point, only my proud and stubborn nature are preventing it.

Of course, pride is rapidly falling away. This morning, I asked R. to fasten my shoes for me because I couldn't bend down to reach them. (The end of flip flop weather was a devastating blow, requiring the purchase of a pair of pretty seriously unattractive size 7s.)

And, meanwhile, everywhere I go, people look at me with a weird blend of sweetness, pity and anxiety. "When are you due?" I'm asked by everyone from baristas to interview subjects, all of whom have the same, slightly uncomfortable it-must-be-really-damn-soon look in their eyes. Even cabbies seem heistant to pick me up for fear of being the reluctant hero of one of those wretched baby-born-in-taxi stories.

Without playing the pregnancy card, I don't have a good excuse (beyond, you know, not getting paid for it or anything and having another full-time job to do) for not blogging this week.

And I'd still like to believe that I am above that. So, for several more weeks -- as long as I can possibly last -- I resolve to get back on the close-to-daily blogging bandwagon. And, should I doze off in the middle of a post, well, it's just because I pulled an all-nighter doing something official and important sounding.

Then, on a single Friday in 1990, he had two pilots rejected by the networks and five of his six existing shows were canceled. The following Monday, he had two new development deals in place.

Stephen J. Cannell, is, in other words, a Player.

Still, when he first walks in to the Palm steakhouse, sporting a serious tan and perfect L.A. teeth, he looks like a straight-from-central-casting Hollywood executive. Dressed in a dark blue shirt, topped with a navy blazer that has been adorned with a plain white pocket square, the impressively trim Cannell, 65, is not the kind of guy who bothers with looking at a menu.

He's a regular at the Palm in L.A., where they make a special "ground round" plate just for him, and a big fan of the pickles and radishes that appear on the table as soon as he sits down. He orders the blackened ribeye special as soon as the waiter names it and then adds a salad to his order "with none of that bitter lettuce. What do you call that, radicchio?"

They're used to special requests here, where caricatures of the famous and semi-famous line the walls and the din of competitively boisterous conversation drowns out soft voices.

Cannell likes attention. He likes buzz. But he is also enough of a writer at heart that, when he looks around the crowded dining room, he says, "If we could get everyone out of here, I could write here, facing that wall."

'It's all just opinion'

Cannell is incredibly prolific -- writer's block has never been an issue, he says, largely because he's never fooled himself into thinking he has to make every sentence soaringly perfect -- and the kind of writer who'll occasionally teach a college fiction workshop just for the fun of it, handing out assignments like, "write a dialogue between a nun and a 16-year-old delinquent who has just done six months in CYA [California's juvenile justice system]."

But, he says, "I don't think of myself as a very good writer."

"Even now?" I ask, pointing out the dozen best-selling books and more than 40 TV series to his credit.

"I don't think it's healthy," he says. "I'm not into acclaim. I tune it out. . . . I kind of don't want to be complimented . . . running a studio, you learn not to trust that, anyway."

He's willing to admit that, yes, of course, "it's nice to have a good review and it's not fun to have a bad one," but he adds, "Really, it's all just opinion. When I first started doing 'Rockford Files' [his first big creation as a producer], I kept reading that it was just average TV, while 'Lou Grant' was doing 'issues.'"

"Rockford" has stood the test of time, Cannell says, and, besides still being watchable, the show holds a certain sentimental value for Cannell.

"I like 'Rockford,'" he says, "obviously because it was a wonderful time in my life. I went from being a nobody to having a line at my door."

The show's success was a surprise, he says. And, in fact, throughout his career, he says he was "continuously surprised by what worked and what didn't."

Who knew, for example, that "The A-Team" (now being made into a movie, which Cannell is producing) would achieve iconic status?

"None of us," Cannell says, laughing. "Or, actually, only George [Peppard]. He said it would be a huge hit before we ever turned on a camera."

I resist humming the theme song and reciting the melodramatic opening lines, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire . . . the A-Team." But Cannell sees me straining.

"Sometimes," he says, "I'll be standing in line at the market, and a guy will have just the right change or something, and he'll say, 'I love it when a plan comes together.' And I get to look at him and say, 'I wrote that!' "

Lost 15-year-old son

Cannell's pride is genuine, almost naive, but it's the pride of a guy who struggled through school with undiagnosed dyslexia, and who never quite thought he'd make anything of himself.

"My father was a really great businessman," he says, "and I was supposed to take over that. When I decided to become a writer instead, it was clearly not about money."

Even now, Cannell says, his priorities don't fit the stereotype of the typical Hollywood Player. He and his wife lost their 15-year-old son to a tragic accident, and Cannell says, "That was a big wake-up call for me."

While he used to spend long nights in the editing room, he started having dinner with his wife of 42 years and their three other children every night.

"I hadn't done that before," Cannell says, ". . . and, when he died, I realized I'd made a wrong choice."

"A wrong choice." It's a quick statement, one on which he clearly doesn't intend to elaborate, the kind of thing that a character on a TV show might say in summing up an important life lesson.

And, after Cannell says it, he is done talking about Hollywood. He fills the rest of our time together with stories about his family.

His career, he says good-naturedly, has evolved from "'Oh, he used to play Mike Hammer' to 'Oh yeah, that's Titus' dad' to 'Oh, he's the warden on "Prison Break."'"

"That's all OK," Keach says, taking off his black "Prison Break" baseball cap and the Goodman Theater credentials he wears around his neck and settling comfortably into a large, corner booth at Petterino's.

"I can't tell you how many times I've heard, 'I loved you as Phillip Marlowe.'" he says.

But Keach, 65, doesn't really mind being identified with the gangster era. He's always been drawn to the kind of "good bad guy -- or is it bad good guy?" characters that populate the noir worlds of Spillane and Chandler and Hammett.

And his own father, Walter Stacy Keach, also called Stacy, had something of a soft spot for that underground world, as well.

"He grew up here," Keach says. "On the North Side, during the Al Capone era. In fact, he worked in a soda fountain and told us he once served Capone and a couple of his guys an ice cream soda."

This story has grown over the years, as it naturally would, into a tale of the young Keach -- who'd been only 11 when his father died, leaving him, an only child, with an obligation to help support his mother through the Depression years -- getting recruited by Capone into running liquor to the Drake Hotel.

"Well," Keach says fondly, "he did deliver a package there once. And he didn't have enough money for cab fare, so he had to ask them for it at the hotel."

Keach's father, who died in 2003 at age 88, "had a great spirit," he says, "and the environment here produced that. ... He came back here a lot, for reunions at Lake View High and Northwestern."

And Keach himself retraced some of his father's steps when he first came to work in Chicago two years ago for the first season of "Prison Break" (7 p.m., Mondays, Fox).

"I went up to Lake View High," he says, "and I had the address of where he'd lived. The brownstone had been converted, but the trees -- I'm sure some of the trees were the same."

Parallel lives

The elder Keach "had a successful career as a character actor [he was probably best known for playing Carlson in 'Get Smart'], but he was also a producer, and he made a number of industrial films," says Keach.

As it happens, he also made the very first educational video for the anti-drug program DARE, a fact that his son, who in 1984 spent six months in a British prison on drug smuggling charges, savors for its "synchronicity." Their lives have paralleled each others' in other ways, as well.

"He didn't want either of his kids to go into the business," Keach says of his father, "but it was hard for him to hide his enthusiasm when we [Keach's brother James is also an actor, director and producer] asked for help with school plays and things. There was this constant thing that he would say, 'I don't want you to be a professional actor. It's a life of misery, constant rejection.' But then we'd go watch them do "Tales of the Texas Rangers "[an RKO radio show Keach Sr. produced], and it was so great, so fun . . . but, 'No, you're not going to be a professional actor.'"

'I love it here'

"With my kids," says Keach, the father of a teenage son and daughter, "I just say, 'Why not try acting?' It's supposed to be reverse psychology."

Happily tucking in to a plate full of chicken hash and fried eggs, Keach, who makes his debut as King Lear at the Goodman on Sept. 19, is clearly relishing his time in Chicago. There's the connection to his father, of course, but also an identification with a certain Midwestern quality that Keach has always seen in himself, but, having been raised in New York and California, never before really identified.

The close-knit cadre of Chicago actors working in Hollywood are, he says, "all friends of mine. Brian Dennehy is a good friend of mine. Gary Sinise is a good friend of mine. George Wendt is a good friend of mine. I love Chicago actors. ... There's a truth. There's a passion for truth. There's no frills surrounding behavioral choices with actors here. Chicago has always produced our best actors. I know New Yorkers would disagree with me, but it's true. Look at the theaters here."

In the weeks that he has been rehearsing for Lear, Keach, a musician himself, has already spent some time taking in performances at the Jazz Showcase. And he says he's looking forward to heading up to the Green Mill, as well.

"I love it here," he says, casting an eye around the busy dining room filled with patrons from the nearby Daley Center and City Hall. "I could see myself settling here; I really could."

At 48, she is unchanged from her days as the anchor of "Entertainment Tonight" and the host of the daytime talk show "Leeza," her slim figure cloaked in a blue wrap dress and her unlined face framed by flawlessly straightened hair. She is also, from the moment I walk into 437 Rush to meet her, absolutely "on."

"You have a great life," she gushes as I sit down, raving about how much fun it must be to eat lunch and read chick lit for a living.

She has done her homework, reading up on past columns, and is in full-on charm mode. She even smells sweetly fabulous, like a combination of baby skin and fresh flowers.

And if all her niceness is meant to result in a ridiculously friendly interview, it's totally working.

"Look at the shape of this fork," she jokes, cradling it. "Look at its perfect curve, the way it just sits so perfectly in your hand. This fork could go straight from appetizer to dessert, from breakfast to dinner. And the weight of it . . . not too heavy, not too light."

She flashes a million-dollar smile and laughs a big, Southern beauty queen laugh.

Gibbons' line of cosmetics is part of a bundle of lifestyle products, including "sheer inspiration" life coaching, which is something she seems to take just slightly too seriously, but this, I can only assume, is a result of having lived in Southern California for 20 years.

"Hollywood is my hometown now," says Gibbons, a South Carolina native. "All three of my kids were born there. . . . They grew up thinking that everybody's mommy is on TV, and that is a little weird."

Support to caregivers

Gibbons, of course, was an early practitioner of the kind of entertainment journalism that brings celebrities into people's homes every night, but she's somewhat less than enthusiastic about what "Entertainment Tonight" has wrought.

"I think a lot of it, honestly, has become shameful," she says. "At times, for me, even just as a consumer of information, it's a little uncomfortable. I think there is a line. I've made my living off the backs of celebrities, but I've tried to keep that line in my mind. I couldn't do it today."

Gibbons is in town to promote the work of the Leeza Gibbons Memory Foundation, the charity she founded when she left broadcasting in 2003 after her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. The organization offers support to caregivers of Alzheimer's sufferers, and expanding its reach, Gibbons says, "is my purpose now."

"The need is tremendous," she says, "and I think we're doing a lot of important work in terms of de-stigmatizing memory disorders."

The foundation sponsors support centers, like the one at Provena St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, called Leeza's Place, where caregivers can take their loved ones for a range of supportive services.

"Rather than saying, 'I think there's something wrong, let's go get you tested for Alzheimer's,' you can go to Leeza's Place and make a scrapbook page together and talk about memory that way," she explains, adding that her own mother is now in the disease's devastating final stages.

Eventually, Gibbons says, she is likely to go back to the lucrative television career that made her entrepreneurial and charitable ventures possible. But she is not sure where she might fit in the brave new world of Internet-driven gossip and scandal-mongering. Her impulse is to somehow try to be . . . nice.

"After I did eight years of [a daytime] talk [show], people would say, 'How do you get people to come on and say that stuff?' And I'd always have to answer, 'How do you get them not to?'" she recalls now, with just the slightest hint of a cringe.

Separated, but loving

Gibbons herself is trying to walk a certain, dignified line between openness and respectable privacy. She earnestly discusses the impact of Alzheimer's on her own family (Gibbons' mother saw her own mother die of the disease, as well) but tries to keep some details away from public view.

And separated from husband Stephen Meadows for almost two years, she maintains a curt dignity when the topic of family arises.

"We are better examples of loving partners now that we are separated," she says, sounding a bit like she might have rehearsed the line.

A good gossip columnist might have pursued the subject, but as Gibbons enjoys a sparkling water and a tomato and mozzarella salad, her cheerful but resolute silence seems to ward off such unpleasantness.

This, I imagine, is what all celebrity interviews were like when the journalists were all as nice as Gibbons.

President Bush upped the summer reading ante this year, when, in early August, he announced that he'd read Albert Camus' The Stranger. Since then, public figures everywhere have been scrambling to find "smart" books to tuck under their arms and tote around.

This weekend, as summer winds down, it might even be time for a few of the more conscientious among them to crack open a cover or two.

And, anyway, I've always been a sucker for the kind of guy who, when he is not sitting in a smoky coffee shop filling his Moleskine notebook with existentialist doodles, can drop names like Camus and Kafka into conversation with casual ease. Admittedly, I am also the kind of person who liked having a Rhodes scholar as president and daydreams about our country being represented, on the world stage, by someone who doesn't talk with food in his mouth.

But I digress.

Following the syllabus

There are any number of overly simple ways to separate people into opposite types -- those who have waited tables and those who haven't, for example -- but, for sheer predictive ability, one of the most useful dividing lines is the one between the kids who, back in school, did all the reading and those who did not.

Those of us who kept to the syllabus tended to be rule-followers in all areas of life. Punctual and law-abiding, we have grown up to be the people who wait for that little on-ramp traffic light to tell us when we can merge onto the expressway. We wear our seat-belts and eat our vegetables.

We might have mid-life crises, but only in socially acceptable forms. Years after our last appearance on an honor roll, we are still remarkably easy to spot. Especially today. Because it's the day before Labor Day weekend and we're in the office, wondering if the boss will let us out early.

The other kids, though -- the ones who prided themselves on their ability to answer essay questions and give oral reports without ever having read more than the back cover of a book -- are harder to pin down.

Some have dropped out. Or flamed out. But others have succeeded brilliantly in all sorts of ventures where rule-following is a handicap rather than a virtue.

Taking their word for it

Being a geek at heart, I am overly fastidious about what I claim to have read.

I've made it better than halfway through Moby Dick, but never all the way, and, in my guilt, I have a tendency to confess this failing at completely inopportune moments, like whenever someone mentions Nantucket.

Similarly, I have listened to Foucault's Pendulum on tape -- an extremely bad idea if you are trying to pay attention to road signs at the same time -- but have never actually read the book. And this bothers me. A lot.

So I have to assume that if the president says he read The Stranger -- plus, he says, "three Shakespeares" -- he really has read it. And if Mayor Daley says he's going to read The Interpreter of Maladies, he means it.

The question for me, then, is what these busy, important men will do with what they find in these great books.

If President Bush and Mayor Daley were in the same book group, what would they talk about over wine and cheese?

Power corrupts

Though they are, theoretically, political opposites, the president and the mayor would seem to have much in common.

There's the whole relentless consolidation of power thing. And the black-and-white, with-me-or-against-me worldview. And the sputtering. And the popular perception, however erroneous, that they're not exactly intellectual heavyweights.

Mostly, though, they have managed, despite their bloodlines, to be understood as "regular" guys who don't have a lot of need for fancy stuff. Real men.

And if it's suddenly OK for them to read the "hard" books and think big thoughts, maybe there's some hope that the nerdy kids among us will finally get a chance to feel cool.

Just imagine what the world would be like if our leaders bothered to do their homework.