We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

I'm the type of spiritual person that doesn't speak openly about their spirituality. Irony is probably my religion.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

I found once you start writing about God it's really fun. It's like a rock singer saying "baby." "Baby, baby, baaayy-by." You start saying "God" on the page and you don't want to stop.

Livability has always struck me as a consolation prize.

I think Trump has made it really hard for people to read, period. He's made it hard for me anyway. Part of his evil is the way it constantly distracts us, constantly upends our horizon. To leave your computer for three hours now is to miss a year's worth of drama. This is programmatic and common to other autocratic regimes of our times.

My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and his life and history were very formative to myself and my family. The almost unimaginable dichotomy between the different eras of his life always crushed my brain on some level. That this guy who was shoveling carob chips out of a barrel and restocking yogurt popsicles could also have those numbers on his arm. It was an inconceivable juxtaposition. His experience was the main window for our family into any kind of social consciousness, or sense of history, or politics, even though a lot of it went unsaid.