Votes for president have long been a kind of social signifier. People will proudly boast that they voted for JFK; while it's harder to find those eager to claim having supported Richard Nixon.

Technology has made it a lot easier to be productive. It's incredibly helpful to be able to get little bits of information quickly.

Trump has humbled our country under the shadow of China's autocrat Xi Jinping.

As a media consultant to Republican presidents, Ailes proved a deft manipulator of racial fear. But it was in building Fox News that he found his calling.

I multitask and always have the TV on in the background. If I need to focus, I generally have to turn off the TV.

If you are a certain kind of white conservative, especially a white male conservative, then Roger Ailes was a hero. He constructed a world in which your core beliefs and your gut instincts were, and still are, constantly validated.

Even at its most outrageous early moments, the Tea Party movement was treated to sober and at times breathless media coverage, to the point of being invited to co-host a presidential debate.

For decades, the GOP has faithfully served the rich, corporations, polluters and purveyors of pure, unadulterated greed, and brought blue-collar white voters along for the ride with promises of cultural revival.

Freedom is neither guaranteed nor automatic; not even in the United States. Left unguarded, it can slip away like a thief in the night.

Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.

Who in the GOP would complain if Trump federalizes 'stop and frisk' or encourages its proliferation in states using the power of the Justice Department purse?

Ailes built a Kingdom of Yes. That was his genius. He understood the id of many white conservatives - their sense of constant persecution and victimization; and their existential fears of an America whose racial makeup, sexual mores and gender roles were careening in the opposite direction of the country of their childhood.

If a novel were written about Florida's administration of its healthcare for the working poor, an appropriate title might be: 'Don't get sick, and God help you if you do.'

Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can't make them vote that way.

To be white in America is to have the confidence to say, without a second thought: this space, this neighborhood, this city, this county, this country is mine.

Local government is a gamble that can have disastrous consequences when it fails.

We should all know our family's story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves.

I've always been interested in rootedness - mainly, I suppose, because I had very little experience of it.

Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it.

'Whoops!' was a spin-off from 'Capital.' I had the research and wanted to place it somewhere.

The truth is, it is hard to know where ideas come from.

'Community,' that loaded word so beloved of politicians, is simply not a reality in most people's lives. It's normal for us to be cut off from each other.

One of the things I have noticed about my novels is that they all concern people who can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives... I've come to realise that this interest in damaged, untellable stories comes from my parents.

The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.