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.

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.

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

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

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

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.

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.