There are plenty of team players in government who do whatever the leader says. There are too few difficult members, who have complicated minds, unusual perspectives, the toughness to withstand the party-line barrages and a practical interest in producing results.

The message of the summoned life is that you don't need to panic if you don't yet know what you want to do with your life. But you probably want to throw yourselves into circumstances where the summons will come.

Woe to you who insults the intelligence community, if you're president.

There are no free and democratic and wealthy countries in the world that have US rate of gun violence. We have to worry about loners and alienated people. We have to do better on mental health.

For us going forward, it's to not reverse the dynamism of American society and the diversity. It's to pay attention to the people who are being ruined by it, and so this doesn't happen again.

Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the [Bush] haters themselves.