Comedy keeps the heart sweet.
I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.
The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.
I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.
Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.
There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.
Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.
There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.
And I love Evander Holyfield to death!
The transition from rebellion to acceptance has an extremely important consequence. . . in which we start seeing life as a training school, to teach us what we need to learn.
What comes next? Super Mario 128? Actually, that's what I want to do.