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.

One can understand the politics of that at this moment. It's an effort to buy time for a constituency of workers who have really been suffering in the last 20 years, and who need to be prepared and be given time to prepare for a transition to a very different type of employment that we may moving on to in the coming decades.

I think that, from Vaclav Havel own experience, he knew if we all paid attention to what was going on, the chances were that even the most horrible dictators wouldn't execute people.

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.

Income tax in particular in the United States is concentrated on the top half of the income distribution, and very heavily skewed towards the top 10 or even top 1 percent.

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

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.