Illness transforms the things you most fear into the things you crave and would hold onto if you could.

Serious loss brings you into one of the world's silent fraternities.

Adrian Leon LeBlanc, my dad and my namesake, his keen joy in observing people and the world is the reason I became a journalist.

There's one thing I know for sure: When I'm most opinionated, my writing sucks.

As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'

A big part of reporting is just being present. You have to show up ten days in a row to get the one telling detail.

It shouldn't be a matter of who deserves help or not, but of whether we want to be a country that allows its neediest to continue to need. Condemnation of individuals and their choices mutes all these other really important logistical questions about funding and budget and politics.

I think you end up on the lucky side, or you don't.

It's hard for me to understand how poverty can be invisible to so many people, since I see it everywhere. Readers sometimes think this world is so different; on the one hand, they feel connected to the people I'm writing about, and on the other hand, they're saying their lives are a world away.

The best comics enlist you to take accountability for who you are, whether you like it or not.