Sometimes you read something and it’s just — it doesn’t invite a reader….Sometimes you read something and it’s not saying, ‘oh come in, come in have a seat. I’m going to tell you what happened.’ Perhaps my writing comes off as conversational…and that takes effort.

Maybe it won’t change the world, but it might change someone’s day.

But I do want to make something clear because it’s important to me as a human. And that is you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man. I don’t think there’s anything funny about it.

The greatest danger to our future is apathy.

The Smithsonian has always been able to rise above the political moment. I don’t see anything that stops that process.

In a democracy, that’s the only realistic path to Net Zero. Consent, not imposition. Honesty, not obfuscation. Pragmatism, not ideology.

In the past, human progress had to come at the cost of the environment. If we wanted energy, we had to burn wood or we had to burn fossil fuels. If we wanted to grow more food, we had to expand farmland, often at the cost of forests. But technology and innovation means we're very quickly decoupling these impacts, such that this conflict is no longer true.

If you don't know what you're living for, you haven't yet lived.

There’s an interesting trend that occurs in times of mounting pressure and high uncertainty, which is that it’s a natural human tendency to seek out people that agree with us, that are similar to us because it’s a source of comfort in a world that’s so rapidly changing.