I believe that sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity is important, and nuanced, even more so when it intersects with the issue of free speech.

I personally favor old mechanical watches, but my snobbery does not extend to demanding that all people wear them. My snobbery demands that no one wear a digital.

Is it really the right of the media to dictate to the president whom he will allow in his press conferences? That's tetchier. And then there is the added issue of whether it would be a service to their readers, and the country at large, for, say, the Washington Post to take itself out of the room -- meaning they don't have the ability to ask important questions the president is obliged to answer? I think that would be a mistake.

I would you say 25-50 percent is the likelihood that my cause of death will be suicide. Not because I am depressive but because I don't attach any moral baggage to suicide, and I have no religion to hold me back. I think suicide is our right, though I think we need to exercise it with knowledge that it can hurt others. So my assumption is that if I got a fatal disease, I'd end things before I got really sick.

Being "Jewish" is way stronger culturally than it is religiously.

We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.

Donald Trump's humor is hostile to a fault.