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.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

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.