Star Wars may be kind of a cartoon, but the original trilogy depicts a political paralysis which breeds an interest in a strong leader who will make a significant break with the past. And Hillary Clinton is a person - whether you like it or not - of extraordinary experience. I don't know if we ever had a presidential candidate with that level of political experience. There's no learning curve for her. And that, in some periods, would be a huge plus. In the end, I think it will be a significant plus for her now.

Great works - and I think Star Wars is a great work - are easily susceptible to multiple plausible interpretations. Some of them are pretty nutty, but the idea that we should see it as profoundly feminist, or as a deeply Christian tale, or as a Freudian exercise... I think all of those have some truth.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

I have argued in favor of a reformulation of First Amendment law. The overriding goal of the reformulation is to reinvigorate processes of democratic deliberation, by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views.

I talked to George Lucas once, not about Star Wars. Everyone wants to talk to him about Star Wars, and I didn't want to be one of those people. In person - at least on this occasion - he wasn't effervescent and giddy, as the Star Wars movies are. He's more focused.

On reflection, some things do super well because they hit with the time. Some things do super well because they are able to activate a kind of echo chamber or bandwagon or cascade - they didn't particularly hit with the time. Some things are just too astonishingly good to not hit the top. Those three explanations, with respect to the Star Wars phenomenon, seem to me all to pass the plausibility test, and to explore them, with respect to Star Wars, I think casts light not just on the saga of our time, but also on everything about our culture.

I would reject the distinction between a Keynesian moment and a behavioral moment.