Amity Shlaes

When you do something moral and upright and wander off by yourself, well, everyone doesn't always follow you, do they, right? You pat yourself on your sanctimonious back but it doesn't mean the crowd rewards you for doing what you think is right.

Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.

Politicians generally act as if there is no cost to reconnecting with voters by building new New Deals. But the whole exercise of writing law out of New Deal nostalgia is a form of national narcissism. Call it New Deal narcissism.

Basically, I get paid to be crazy. I get paid to believe I'm someone else, live in a completely false reality, and believe it's real. And that's a little scary. And I do it to the best of my ability. But it's kind of like swimming out to sea. You have to leave enough energy to swim back, and sometimes you get scared you swam too far.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.