For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships - certainly far more so than romantic love. Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person.

I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking.

What I love about the Internet and what I try to do on the issues is insist upon the ability to have bad taste if one wants.

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.

The good news about me is that my friends and social network is entirely independent of politics.

I enjoy being around people who disagree with me; and I enjoy being in non-political contexts and activities.

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.