Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

Long before the technology revolution there was declassification of documents and I've spent quite a lot of time studying declassified internal documents and written a lot about them. In fact, anybody who's worked through the declassified record can see very clearly that the reason for classification is very rarely to protect the state or the society from enemies. Most of the time it is to protect the state from its citizens, so they don't know what the government is doing.

There's a radical insurgency, which is a large part of the Republican base, which is willing to do anything, destroy the country, whatever, in order to get rid of this Affordable Care Act. That's the one thing that they're able to hang onto.

The reason I am a political radical is that I work on syntax. If I worked on semantics (which in fact I do), I'd be a good Thatcherite.

An unstated but crucial premise is that the "responsible men" achieve that exalted status by their service to authentic power, a fact of life that they will discover soon enough if they try to pursue an independent path.

Take Google - I can use it, you can use it, anyone else can use it, but we all know its designed so that private power can influence significantly how you access it.

The neoliberal programs of the last generation have in fact been, and were intended to be, a pretty serious attack on democracy, but also they've led to stagnation or decline for large parts of the population - the working class, the lower middle class, these people have essentially been cast aside.