The president-elect Donald Trump moved a bit closer to getting his Cabinet in place with another round of confirmation hearings. The most contentious was for his treasury secretary pick, Steven Mnuchin, a billionaire banker who worked at Goldman Sachs and owned a hedge fund. There was important news that came out during the hearing. Mnuchin said that he would support raising the debt ceiling sooner rather than later, and not risk the country defaulting.

If you spend enough time in or around Washington, you'll meet amazing people who work for the government.

It's very typical that when two people are having lunch, they put a phone on the table between them.

More than half the U.S. population and more than half of the voters in this election were women. Among them, 42 percent voted for Donald Trump, 54 percent went for Hillary Clinton, essentially the reverse of how men voted.

There's no embassy for the United States in Iran. So, Iranians process those in other countries.

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.

We're obviously in speculation territory here, because we don't know what the Trump administration is going to do.