In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.

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.

New York City is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change, so I see Keystone as the central threat to New York.

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

What happens in New York affects national policy in very significant ways.

Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.

History is a series of mistakes. Now the task is to plan for those mistakes so those of us who are populists can actually take over the reins of power when the right mistakes are made.