There is too large a divergence at the moment in the interests and values of the world's most powerful states.

Academics were not a challenge when I was fifteen in college. The challenge was figuring out how to fit in socially.

State capitalism is about more than emergency government spending, implementation of more intelligent regulation, or a stronger social safety net. It's about state dominance of economic activity for political gain.

I think it's fantastically narcissistic to believe that in the entire universe, with all of the planetary systems that we've already discovered and the countless others that are out there, that we are the only forms of life.

Sometimes you check things off because you've done them. If you aren't checking stuff off your bucket list, you aren't living very well.

Strong states and blocs of strong states are the only source of power and legitimacy capable of driving an international agenda in today's world.

The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime's safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.