Environment, homelessness, infrastructure and immigration - I'm very focused on all four, which are critical to the success of Los Angeles.

Campaigns are these moments of suspended animation where people usually learn how to be friends afterward.

I'd hate to see new housing building accelerating while taking down buildings where there's 50 people living in rent-stabilized apartments.

You see as mayors and local officials our jobs are designed so we have more in common with our constituents than Washington politicians can ever have.

Only reprobates father children and then abandon them.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don't read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds.

Women with education, skills, and independent sources of income are more able to withstand the pressures of the patriarchal family and more able to express their opinions and to move freely within their communities.

A lot of the stuff about white-supremacist groups was very family-friendly: 'We just love our people.' One the surface, you go, 'Gee, what's wrong with loving your people?' But when you love your people to the exclusion of everything else that's remotely different, that's when you get into trouble.