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.

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.

For our family, learning was everything. Homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor.

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.

I don't tweet or do any other social media, so I don't know what's being said out there.

I think that the Internet - and I do love the free flow of ideas on the 'Net - is like the wild west of the information world.

I think people who don't go away to university are missing out on one of the great life experiences. You meet people from so many different places and it's the shared life experience that helps you grow.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us.'