As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points.
More and more, the superrich don't live in one place but many, flitting between multiple homes on different continents, flying to them on private jets, perhaps, concealing many of their real estate purchases through webs of shell companies and trusts.
I'm a son of immigrants. I'm not going to reduce my commitment to immigration. But can I empathize with the fact that if your town was 95 percent all white and now it's down to 60, that that can scare you? Can I empathize with that? Yeah.
When you first arrive in India, you think, 'God, these Indians treat their servants so badly! How awful!' It's something in the air, and something about the way people are, that very few people hold out. I wasn't able to. Everybody goes local. You stop saying 'thank you' and things like that.
Taking offense is, in fact, one of the few things that brings us together.
America has deep, fundamental institutions that take a long time to replicate.
My mother grew up strong. She was a charismatic leader among her peers, staging plays, organizing projects, raising money for charity; she was fiercely protective of her younger brother, with whom she shared a passion for jazz and rock and roll.
Americans don't realize how difficult it is to create a Harvard.
To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.
America has two clear tiers of workers: contractors and employees. The former have few regulatory protections; the latter have many.
I will not concede for a moment that old privileges should not dwindle. They cannot dwindle fast enough.
IT put India on the map of the world and told Indians that they are somebody in the world. There is something about technology that is very empowering: 'We are designing software for the best companies in the world.'
I am very happy to be an American. I realize what a valuable inheritance that is.
Crowdsourcing aid is a cunning way to work around the do-nothing corridors of official Washington. But it also raises complicated questions about the nature of humanitarianism and what it means for a 'nation' to help.
Our societies have experienced the magic that occurs when pluralism flourishes and the marginalized assume their proper powers. But loss stalks those victories, as millions revolt against change and supremacies resurface.
Language is one of the only things that we truly share, and I sometimes used this joint inheritance to obfuscate and deflect and justify myself: to re-brand what was good for me as something appearing good for us both, when I threw around terms like 'the sharing economy' and 'disruption' and 'global resourcing.'
Birthright citizenship in America is part of something larger: The American longing to sever from history, to be a place of new beginnings.
Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose.
Election time is when you start to hear about 'average people,' 'working families,' 'patriotic Americans' and such.
In an economy increasingly dominated by network effects, peer-to-peer transactions, self-regulation, and contract labor, the old frameworks are woefully irrelevant.
