When I choose the picture of the cover of the book 'Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi', I thought, gosh, many people in Karachi may not like this image; I'm representing the city as a burning bus. But to the contrary, they loved it, because that is people's understanding of their own city, of going on with life no matter what.

Democrats have simply lost the country.

Congress can grant a waiver [for General James Mattis ] and has done that once in history.

[Mark] Lilla is a professor at Columbia University in New York, and he has waded into the debate about what Democrats and liberals should do now. Some Democrats answer nothing.

People don't know where they stand and what they're going to lose, and that makes things uncertain. The political parties try to meld people together, but then that becomes a problem. There are parallels here, to American cities, which, in the '80s, with massive rural to urban migration, saw incredible amounts of violence.

[Identity liberalism] is about recognition and self-definition. It's narcissistic. It's isolating. It looks within. And it also makes two contradictory claims on people.

Many Democrats are in a reflective mood . They lost the White House this year [2016], which would not matter as much as it does, except they also failed to take back the Senate, remain out of power in the House and are out of power in most states.