Whatever your gender, you can be a Star Wars fan. Of course I knew it from life before, but the core of enthusiastic female fans is a testimony to the non-gendered nature of the audience.

There are bursts of things like Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan or Franklin Delano Roosevelt or same-sex marriage that change very much what we thought we were all about.

It's fair to say that there's something retrograde about putting the leader of Star Wars rebellion in the position of "slave in a bikini." There's no question that that's a fair point. But, it is true, and it's kind of remarkable, that at this point in our history, the slave girl, for a time in the bikini, is the one who chokes her captor with her bare hands and using the chain with which he bound her. That's powerful stuff. That's more retributive feminism than I think teenaged boys had ever seen.

I'll tell you an explanation that I find commonly overrated and speculative in the extreme: the idea that things that succeed in popular culture do that because they hit the temper of the times.

I think President Barack Obama has been an extraordinarily successful president, and that this period will record that with a bunch of exclamation points. But obviously not everybody thinks that.

I got into the genesis of Star Wars, and the tale seemed to me endlessly fascinating.

Almost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And, if the court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.