Wasting time reading blogs, magazines, newspapers. They have their place but they can become an addiction. And the real ways to gain understanding about issues are reading books and traveling.

I’ve a deplorable tendency to become entrenched in my own prejudices: If I dislike an artist, an art form, or an idea (jazz, ballet, certain kinds of fiction) it is extremely difficult to get me to change my mind, and all evidence presented to the contrary will be discarded and very likely mocked. Of course, nobody suffers but me.

Jumping to conclusions. We all create hypotheses in undisciplined fashion, and then you have to go back and be intellectually disciplined.

My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.

I believe that I had something called epigenetic imprinting, which I actually read about in a book called The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine. Not to self-promote too much, but I loved it so much I wrote a movie with a brilliant comedian named Neil Brennan and made the move this year. That’s how profoundly it changed my life, because I believe that the more we know about our neural brain wiring, the more freedom we have and the more patience we have with ourselves.