Donald Trump and Senator Cruz have occasional Manichean tendencies.

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.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

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.

As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.

A lot of people are focused on climate change as a defining challenge of our time. A lot of people think it is a non-problem, at least in the United States.

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