Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.