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

For the Sanders supporters, there's a thought that the people who are well off are doing really great, and the system is systematically unfair, and that's a very deeply felt and serious objection to the current situation.

The opening scene in A New Hope, when you see the huge ship, it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on... that is like a joke of awesomeness.

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.

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.

My role in the government was not to think about narratives and consistency with narratives, but think of the human consequences of rules.

The fear of loss is an engine of horrors, but also a source of the greatest forms of heroism. There's not a lot of art that puts that in bold letters. It's psychologically very interesting and acute, I think. That's not the central reading, I think, of the New Testament.