Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.
I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.
I think the way the audience takes the Indian film-star is a little different from the way the audience takes the Western star there. We are considered like demi-gods here, and the reason is not because we are better or good, but because there is no other mode of entertainment in India.
I modelled in my 20s, and it was an obsessive time. I was under pressure to look a certain way.
The contribution of Islam to history and modern civilization is the product of the efforts of peoples of many races and tongues which came to accept its way of life.
The bedroom is an archetype. To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don't really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense.
Now there is in a way a renaissance of modern dance - suddenly, it is more respected and discovered.
Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.
I am actually a perfectly capable modern man who can cook, clean, wash, and find my way to places, but nobody believes it.
There's the way modern music is produced, which is, 'Here's a piece of music, and I'm the producer, so pay me and make sure my credit is right and get me my splits.' But I'm trying to go backward. Now, it's more like 'What's the texture? What's the over-arching story?' There are more things to pay attention to than 'Is this the right snare?'
A third ideal that has made its way in the modern world is reliance on reason, especially reason disciplined and enriched by modern science. An eternal basis of human intercommunication is reason.
It is the child's understanding that teaches the adults the way of the future. They're still doing it today with modern technology.
As a modern woman, there are things I take for granted, and that shows up in the way I sit, the way I walk, the way I think, and what I know to be possible.
In the modern world, those who are weak will get unambiguous advice from foreign visitors which way to go and what policy course to pursue.
I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I'm going the other way. I don't want anyone knowing anything about me anymore.
Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a modernist.
Artists need some kind of stimulating experience a lot of times, which crystallizes when you sing about it or paint it or sculpt it. You literally mold the experience the way you want. It's therapy.
The naked mole is, like, the ugliest freakin' creature in the world. It is so radically, unbelievably disgusting. And the star-nosed mole is also. It looks like it snorted a firecracker. They live way underground, and to get footage of them is basically impossible.
Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.
Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.
