The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.