That's one of the surprises in the research, that's it's not young people who are smitten with their phones. It's their parents who are not paying attention to them.

All the research shows that the presence of that phone will do two things to the conversation. It will make the conversation go to trivial matters, and it will decrease the amount of empathy that the two people in the conversation feel toward each other. That phone is a signal that either of us can put our attention elsewhere.

In my book ["Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age], I argue that we're vulnerable to technologies.There's a 40 percent decline in all markers for empathy among college students, with most of it taking place in the past years.

Some days you feel like you've had the greatest ego massage, then the next day you've been trampled on.

Historically, when times are bad, voters, especially in the Industrial Midwest, have turned to the Democrats.

I think he [Vaclav Havel] probably would have liked to have written more plays. I think he missed being a playwright.I think he talked about wanting to write plays and keep appealing to people through that medium, rather than politics.

Vaclav Havel had this great sense of humor. And you kind of felt that he was making a little bit fun of everything at the same time.