Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.

The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

Call it 'nationalism' when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word 'patriotism' for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.

I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

We [on the left] have to be used to being a minority -- a small minority -- for some time to come. The odd thing is that the right, even when it is in power, likes to think of itself as an embattled minority against this elite that somehow runs everything. Whereas the left, even when it has no power at all, likes to imagine it somehow represents the majority of people. These are mirror-image delusions.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.