It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying.

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

People have just assumed that... if we call our Facebook acquaintances our friends, we must be influenced by them, too. But we're not.

It is the spread of the good things that vindicates the whole reason we live our lives in networks. If I was always violent to you or gave you germs, you would cut the ties to me and the network would disintegrate. In a deep and fundamental way, networks are connected to goodness, and goodness is required for networks to emerge and spread.

There are very fundamental reasons we live our lives in social networks and if we really understood the role they're playing in our society we would take better care of social networks and find ways to take advantage of their power to improve our society.

One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers.