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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.