When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

Growing up in Connecticut, all the Colonial houses looked alike. In Los Angeles, the diversity is so extreme, it's baffling.

When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.

If you care about women's rights, you can't not vote.

In my opinion, serving the common good is the true purpose of politics and is also the perspective through which our community should consider constitutional reform.

The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.

American elections should be for Americans. And the idea that we would have foreign nation-states coming into the American electoral process, or the information surrounding an election, is really, really bad.

I am not in a position to be accurate on news analysis. But what I firmly believe is that Iranian President Rouhani and the government have committed themselves to a process. I don't think this process is about changing the principles of the Islamic republic, but it is about accepting a certain path of opening in the political and economic fields.