If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.

I think part of the reason the Tea Party has resonated is that people feel disempowered. The Tea Party says, "You are out of power because of big government." Then some Democrats tend to respond by saying, "No, you're wrong, you're not out of power." It's a sense that doesn't resonate with people's lived experience.

It's a lot harder to push forward things, like energy policy. There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power.

You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.

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.

One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics.

I tend to be a kind of left federalist. There's a value to more power of certain kinds being positioned at a more local level.