I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

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.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.