Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.