America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that, in some senses, could be thought of as traditionally American - the idea that everybody's equal, that the rights of women and men should be the same, that there should be no discrimination on religious or sexual orientation, that democracy and rule of law and due process are the ways in which society should govern themselves and minorities should be cared for.

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.

I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.