I wasn't that good at science, and I gave up on math long before I should have. I like to think if I were in school today that would be different.
A lot of people who voted for Barack Obama expected and were led to expect something new in politics: a new tone of political discourse in Washington. And I think - I think they're disappointed, because Barack Obama is not a new kind of politician. In fact, he's an old Chicago politician.
It would make everything I worked for meaningless if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.
A lot of times I feel I probably would have ended up in a mental hospital if it weren't for the structure that 'Bones' gave me.
I grew up in a little funny town called Xuzhou, in the countryside, very poor. We didn't have hot water. We were four children: three girls and a boy.
When I was younger, I did have some dresses that weren't the best fits, and it can definitely affect you during a match - if you're having to constantly pull the dress down, for example!
If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.
The idea of Twitter started with me working in dispatch since I was 15 years old, where taxi cabs or firetrucks would broadcast where they were and what they were doing.
Whenever somebody folds, say, 'Good laydown.' It encourages them to fold on a later hand because it makes them feel like you had the best hand even if you were bluffing. It's an odd form of flattery that seems to work at the poker table.
When I was at school, you had to choose; there was a lot of pressure to assimilate. You were an Aussie, or you were one of 'the wogs' - which was everybody else. But I didn't want to be in either group, so I felt like an odd one out.
Your family are people you lean on and learn from. When I told my family I wanted to do music, they were really supportive.
Often when you are starting out in comedy, you will find that people will laugh at the things you didn't think were funny. It's important to pay attention also to what people are laughing at when you are just talking in regular conversation. Often that is when you are truly being yourself.
I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.
My mom and stepdad were strict. I couldn't date; I couldn't go out. And I was a kid who was never good at just taking no for an answer. I needed to understand why. And sometimes they weren't interested in explaining.
The way that we're consuming what we watch. Netflix, binge-watching, destination agnostic were not terms. It was about networks, times, dates. Even with feature films, you had to see it this way, in this capacity, at this time. All that has changed. Now it's really about the story. It's a gift that I became a storyteller at this time.
Unfortunately, the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve.
If firms were made to hire according to quotas, it might optimize the percentage of women in the industry, but that doesn't necessarily translate into more quality products for the customer.
One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.
In the aftermath of President Obama's re-election, members of both the administration and the media trumpeted that Obama had received his long-sought mandate. Obamacare, Americans were told, was the law of the land. It could not be changed; it could not be stopped.
My earlier books, 'The Oath,' 'This Present Darkness' were pretty straight adventure. 'The Visitation' is like a deeper book, more thought-provoking. It probes at character more.
In 1972 through '74, right before we hit it big, we were hauling our own equipment into the club and setting up and playing for, I don't know, a hundred bucks a night.
I'm constantly not on the right side of history. I sympathize with the soldiers in the enemy's camp. For example in WWII, we know the Nazis and the Japanese were wrong. But I sympathize with the individual story of a soldier who was drafted into that.
For me, when I grew up playing music, I played music in church and people were shouting and having a big time, and church wasn't something where it was subdued. If you played something, you brought it to church with you.
We've played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
When we filmed the premiere episode of 'United Shades of America,' it was like we were turning over a rock in the woods. The KKK was not part of the national conversation. They were really just a punchline for comedians when you needed to let the audience know something was really, really, really racist.
My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.
In the glory days of Orioles, when I was a newbie baseball writer for the Post, the roster of talkers was as good as the everyday lineup. Singy - Ken Singleton - Flanny, and Cakes - the underwear spokesman Jim Palmer - were my go-to guys, occupying stalls along one wall of the shabby chic clubhouse.
The older generations are too wedded to political parties, too wedded to romantic memories of what education was like when they were kids, and too wedded to the status quo group that clings to power.
My dad is an art director for BBC TV shows, and my mum does screen printing workshops. Both of my parents played instruments, too, and my mum used to have crazy house parties when me and my brother were young - dub and garage would be banging through my house.
We were trying to get all of the planes down out of the sky. And we watched as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed - something no one expected and anticipated. And you could sit there and see and be aware that thousands of people were at that moment being killed as a result of the terrorist attacks that struck the United States.
Conceived as a short-term remedy to the occasional ailment of acute labour shortages in key industries, the indentured-labour service had to be dismantled by the Conservatives owing to its inevitably scandalous abuse by disreputable employers. By 2012, there were 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada.
Business models that are relevant today are not relevant tomorrow and were not in existence yesterday.
I learned to take those experiences that were difficult in my life and in the adversity that I had overcome to use it for a positive change.
In high school I had sex with girls quite a few times. They were straight women who I convinced to jump in the sack with me.
New York was the Promised Land growing up. Writers were gods! The great gods of American culture... I thought.
My parents were big music fans, and my dad plays music, so I grew up with Madonna, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Alice In Chains... it was all over the place. I had a Third Eye Blind record, but I also had Korn, Courtney Love, and Shania Twain.
