But I will be horrified by the way I say kind of and like, and I keep qualifying everything. That’s very feminine. I would like to say it plain, but it always comes out with all these silly qualifiers.

I don’t believe anything is black and white, so I’m always searching for nuance. On the whole I think this is a positive thing, but it also means I almost never give an unqualified answer.

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.

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

I think I did always want to change the world from the time I was six. And I guess that was part of both the positive and the pressure.

Eleanor Roosevelt. She represents a woman of great privilege, who never shied away from that privilege. She used her privilege to help the most vulnerable, the voices unheard.

One of the biggest lessons of my life, Krista, has been that we can’t separate the world into monsters and angels and that there’s nothing like loving people and knowing friends who played different roles in the genocide, including being perpetrators, that makes you have to confront that most raw element of what it means to be human. And the only conclusion I could make was that there are monsters and angels in each of us and that those monsters really are our broken parts — they’re our insecurities; they’re our fears; they’re our shames — and that in times of insecurity, it becomes really easy for demagogues to prey on those broken parts and sometimes make us do terrible things to each other.

My ability to connect with people. I think I can see people and they feel it.

But the book I give right now in this time of so much despair is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, where he really looks at people in the Holocaust and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumple up and die and others stayed resilient and strong? And that at the end of the day, no one can take our dignity away from us.

On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. ... Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.