I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they're normal and can't be changed. A lot of what I write about is, "Hey, you know, this stuff is really awful, and it doesn't need to be, and that's why it's so offensive." Things should be better.

When I heard the book (Thomas Friedman's latest) was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays.

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.

Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.

This idea that you can't be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don't stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It's possible to do this job with honor and dignity.