The Arab awakening was like watching elephants fly: something you didn't expect, something you haven't seen before, "Wow, elephants fly."

So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist...If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.

Yes, the world is now flat for publishing as well.

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.

No matter what your profession – doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant – if you are an American, you better be good at the touchy-feely service stuff, because anything that can be digitized can be outsourced to either the smartest or the cheapest producer.

Never before in the history of the planet have so many people, on their own, had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people.