One-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don't talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me. They've just memorized that stupid fact sheet. And we thought, gosh do we sound that good? It didn't seem possible. But that was my introduction to politics.

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.