Create sacred spaces in the workplace as well. Classrooms, five years ago, professors would say, I don't want be a nanny to my students. They can do whatever they want. Now professors are saying, put away that laptop, because studies show that it not only takes away the attention of the person who's on the laptop from the class, but everyone around them. There's like a circle around that person that's distracted and not paying attention.

A definitive decision to say you should start people on therapy as soon as you know they're infected.

CD4 being the level of the lymphocyte that indicates the level of your immune function.

The heyday perhaps of American public infrastructure is the Sputnik moment of the 1950s, the [Dwaight] Eisenhower administration, for instance, which rolls out the modern interstate system. The highway system of the United States is built during this period.

I think that Election Day is the closest thing we have to a civic sacrament, when people meet their neighbors at the firehouse or the school and they vote at the same time.

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.

In the study, 89 percent of Americans said that they interrupted their last social encounter by looking at a phone. And 82 percent of them said that it deteriorated the conversation.