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

Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving.

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 is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

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

Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.