I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.

All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.

As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.