If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin.

When you get people standing up saying, 'I'm going to just tell the truth; what do we have to fear?,' it encourages others, and it creates a counterresponse.

If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status.