I think the reason you see so many people dropping out of politics is because there's an anti-poetic strain in modern political discourse.

What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.

A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics. People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, "Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?".

Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country.

A combination of working in politics as well as teaching and being [an actor] certainly helped. I became so much more comfortable in front of a crowd. I felt like I was calling on all those other experiences.

There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.

I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.