David Brooks, on why politicians' travel riders are boring:

In the first place it's interesting to watch politicians and their staffs try to come up with lists of items intended to produce sensual pleasure. People who go into politics tend to be the sort of hyperambitious workaholics who have repressed the Dionysian side of their natures in order to become high school tools, college applicant all-stars and twenty-something mentor magnets, in pursuit of their dreams of someday becoming deputy under secretary of commerce. Then they flock to Washington, a city with an erogenous zone the size of a pea. These are not people with highly developed hedonism skills.