Your working assumption, when you meet a homophobe, should be that they are gay.

The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.

The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don't begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives - and millions may die there.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do.

The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.

The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers. They are nudging close to having the moral credibility of Holocaust deniers.

The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It's actually going to deepen it.