My friend jewelry designer Courtney Crangi has been obsessed with Star Wars all her life and has seen the movies 150 times. When we first started talking about it, I was amazed that her knowledge made mine - which was even then pretty impressive - seem pathetic. And I think there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the leader of the rebellion is Princess Leia. American theatergoers had never seen a princess like that. She's not a delicate flower, she's not passive, she's often the only one who has a clue.

I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

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.

Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can't take their own side in an argument.

A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.

Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.