I think the Trump thing is particularly egregious, and I think he's as much a product of the GOP lie machine in the era of Roger Ailes as he is of television. And also, of the Twitter era. Of the everything-is-as-reductive-as-it-can-be. To me, the most telling thing is we have a man who cannot complete a sentence. Certainly could never get to 140 characters, or past it. He thinks in tiny little bursts - the way he tweets.

What Sarah brings to the part is her intelligence, at the same time, she's got that hormonal, idiosyncratic goofiness that makes Buffy not just the Terminator.

It seemed to be a fundamental thing that women have something men don't, the obvious being an ability to bear children, and the resilience to hang in as parents. I don't understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of "women are inferior".

The thing about changing the world... Once you do it, the world's all different.

I think it's always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it's successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.

Limitations are something that I latch onto - like working in genre, or if you're writing TV, there are act breaks, there's a length of time it's supposed to be. The restrictions of budget and sets can be really useful. When you can have everything, it's very hard to make things feel real and lived in.

You are going to change the world, because that is actually what the world is. You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the world. You always have been.