The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is the result of what police call "noble cause corruption," the belief that because you are dedicated to doing good, you can do no wrong.

I think one of things that Steve Jobs, in his own funny way, encouraged us to remember with those "Think different" posters of Gandhi and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King was, "How do you make the world a better place?"

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

You see the natural progression of what happens when the executive gets power and then a new executive comes in. The new executive doesn't say, "Oh, man. The president has just got too much power. We're going to dial that back." No, they expand the power. It's like, "He didn't use it well, so I'm going to take more power and use it better because I'm a better guy and my values are better." Then you suddenly realize that the very people who were attacking Guantánamo prior to getting into office are now the people expanding an assassination program overseas.

Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.

I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.

The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.