Big data will replace the need for 80% of all doctors
I want to write for history, not for the moment.
I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.
It's hard to know exactly how people develop the characters they do. There could be people from humble beginnings that turn into jerks. Some characteristics are just part of that special soul of that human being.
It seemed that I could tell the whole story pretty powerfully in those 18 months between October of '62 and the spring of '64 when they were all at their peak. And yet you could see some of the shadows of Detroit's demise coming.
My basic philosophy is that no human being is a saint.
I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.
Sometimes funerals can be good. It reunites you with your cousins you haven't seen in a while.
That balance of love for your work and love in your life is an interesting thing.
For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism. . . We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves.
The sad fact is that we're not educated to be aware and therefore able to question the reality created by our thinking. We don't realize that we must take responsibility for our thoughts to find out if they are really true, and then set aside or at least acknowledge those that are simply opinion and bias. We don't recognize that most thoughts are ultimately judgments, and that the truth of any judgment is how that judgment makes us feel.