By birth and upbringing, I think I'm emotionally resilient. I don't feel like I'm a depressive person.

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on.

We can have Americans eating affordably and eating in a way that's sustainable.

Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But thats where an interesting conversation begins.

Congress should ban advertising that preys upon children, it should stop subsidizing dead-end jobs, it should pass tougher food safety laws, it should protect American workers from serious harm, it should fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power.

I'd been eating fast food all my life without thinking about it. And the more I learned about the subject, the more intrigued I became.

One might expect that the families of murder victims would be showered with sympathy and support, embraced by their communities. But in reality they are far more likely to feel isolated, fearful, and ashamed, overwhelmed by grief and guilt, angry at the criminal-justice system, and shunned by their old friends.