You can have somebody living next door to you and you can live in a completely different world from that person, which is definitely something we've never experienced before. So I think just because of the media landscape and the way we get our information now, we're more atomized and isolated from each other than ever before.

Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight.

America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.

If you look back in history, as the barbarians were invading the gates of Rome, people were consulting fortunetellers and worrying about the end of the world and all sorts of other apocalyptic notions. When the tsars were finally overthrown, they were all reading tarot cards even as the revolutionaries were banging at the gates.

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.