Fantasy-based ideologies invariably have neat happy endings where all the bad people and all the bad behavior goes away when the volume is turned up and enough force is applied.

The fact is, presidential politics has become a game of inches.

A nation is not a budget, no matter how much ideologues want it to be so.

The irony is that the people we tend to vote for actually look down on voters and voting. That's just idiotic, right? That's like a snake eating its own tail! A wolf in a trap gnawing off its own head to escape!

Social media has created a legion of social delinquents, billions of people speaking not their minds but their spleens, venting everything from the gum-cracking snark befitting a hair-twisting mallrat to the froth-flecked rage of a bell tower marksman.

The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of peoples lives.

I tend to be very relaxed on stage, but the nerves have to come out somehow.