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

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.

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.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

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.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

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