Legalizing marijuana would make a lot of sense, I don't think there's a single case of marijuana overdose on record and tens of millions of users. It's much less dangerous than alcohol, for example.

It is one thing for the institution to offer space for serious engagement, in thought and action, and to encourage free and independent use of such opportunities; it is something else for the university to become engaged as an institution, beyond a fairly narrow range where true consensus exists, and even that raises questions.

Michael Flynn, national security adviser, [his reaction] to the Iranian missile test the other day was very frightening. Now the missile test is ill-advised, they shouldn't have done it. But it's not in violation of international law or international agreements. They shouldn't have done it. His reaction suggested maybe we're going to go to war in retaliation.

If you look at say, England and Germany a century ago, which had the most advanced navies then, they were dealing with extremely tricky technological problems. Putting a huge gun on a moving platform and ensuring that it could hit another moving target was one of the hardest technical problems of the early twentieth century.

In any institution-factory, university, health center, or whatever-there are a variety of interests that ought to be represented in decision-making: the work force itself, the community in which it is located, users of its products or services, institutions that compete for the same resources. These interests should be directly represented in democratic structures that displace and eliminate private ownership of the means of production or resources, an anachronism with no legitimacy.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

The US and Canada are now increasingly isolated in the hemisphere, and sooner or later, I think we're going to find that the US and Canada are simply excluded from hemispheric affairs. That's a sharp reversal of what was the case not long ago.