Who's the big government guy? These labels are nonsense. And the Tea Party, if you want to call them working class, you know, a working-class insurgency from below, they are a mass of contradictions; they don't have a single consistent viewpoint; but part of their impulse is to be wary of government.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

That's where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.

Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.

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

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.