I am not a post-liberal and I do not think that such a return to full 19th-century anticlericalism inevitable or even likely - which is one reason among many that I doubt the bargain many religious conservatives have made with Donald Trump.

There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find themselves pressured, financially and culturally, to keep up with the dual-earning Smith-Joneses next door.

A diverse elite may be good in its own right, as a matter of justice and representation. But nothing about being a woman or a minority makes you immune to meritocracy's ruthless solipsism.

Donald Trump could win the presidency without a popular-vote majority only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies that are partially responsible for our government's ineffectiveness and gridlock.

Trump could also only win the presidency without a popular-vote majority because a large region of the country, the greater Rust Belt and Appalachia, had been neglected by both parties' policies over the preceding decades, leading to a slow-building social crisis that the national press only really noticed because of Trump's political success.

There may be left-wing or liberal solutions to our deeper problems. But an elite that tries to manage them away with more enlightened media curation deserves to inherit nothing but the wind.

In Barack Obama's second term, with his legislative agenda dead in a Republican-controlled Congress, the president turned to executive unilateralism on an innovative scale.

It is not white nationalism to believe that growing ideological uniformity in the commanding heights of culture makes American politics more polarized.

It is not white nationalism to recognize limiting principles on liberal universalism, and a justifiable role for particularity - ethnic, cultural, religious - in many political arrangements.

I grew up in a household that spent most of my childhood on a religious pilgrimage through American Christianity.

I get the sense people sort of imagine that in my personal religious life I must be an intense rigorist wearing a hair shirt under my clothes while scourging myself. And, really, I'm not a rigorist by temperament.

I didn't really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn't present for or a participant in a lot of the John Paul II-era debates about papal authority.

I don't think of 'heretic' as a pejorative term - necessarily.

My view of Trump is that, while he has done some extremely noxious things, in general his worst feature, his most authoritarian feature, really is his public presentation.

The prosperity gospel, in its various forms, has always been with us and always will. But that reality is no less problematic for being inescapable.

I think that the politicians who were beaten by Donald Trump and then endorsed him, that's something that they will carry and should carry, for the duration of their career.

Even conservative columnists tend to prefer humor that isn't fit to print.

I think Trump had this general populist agenda but has not been particularly adept at using the levers of power in Washington.

I think that ultimately the Christian vision of sexuality - the New Testament vision - is not compatible with same-sex marriage. And I don't see a way to change that without entering into a kind of deception, basically.

I think generally, Pope Benedict did a good job cleaning up the way the church handled abusive priests but didn't go far enough in how he handled bishops who enabled them.

I try not to feel too embattled. I don't think that's a healthy approach for someone who writes for a newspaper like the New York Times to take. That means, in part, that I try and avoid wallowing in things that might make me feel too embattled.

Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.

It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.

Fox News is really two news networks. It's a center right news network that has good, solid, interesting coverage if you're watching Chris Wallace or the panel on 'Special Report' or anything like that. Then, it has what Hannity and others like him do, which is just a sort of tribal identity politics for older white people.

I think you can see a clear link between certain kinds of Christian nationalism and support for Trump. Then, I also think that Trump is benefiting from the weakening of religious participation. He's winning evangelicals who aren't in church.

Yeah, I think that social conservatives recognize that they didn't just lose the debate about same-sex marriage. They lost the debate about the institution of marriage, and those two things were sort of connected to each other. The way people thought about marriage changed.

We've always been a nation of heretics.

The American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey, let's put it that way.

There were times at Harvard when I actually longed to hang out with a few more Trotskyists, rather than yet another set of future consultants and investment bankers. At least the Trotskyists cared about the important stuff.

Jewish Americans weren't just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.

For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn't just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case.

When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you're supposed to have a 'hook,' an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question.

As a generalization, fantasy writing has leaned more on political storytelling the more it's tried to escape the inevitable influence of Middle-earth, and revise the Eurocentric and Christian tropes that Tolkien's particular worldview bequeathed.

I guess my first instrument was the recorder when I was about five or six.

I started playing guitar when I was 14.

What's interesting about Vampire Weekend, everyone in the band, except for me, had a band in high school in which they were the lead singers. And I'm the one who never had that experience.

The first Vampire Weekend record was the first full-length album that I produced.

Whenever I work on a project I put all of myself into it.

I don't have to just have one kind of life. I can have several different creative lives.

I tend to use different microphones, different mic techniques, and different recording mediums - like analogue tape - that evoke multiple eras of recorded music at the same time.

I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.

Yeah, I'd always wanted to do a song with finger-picked, nylon-string guitar.

I feel like when I was in college I was listening to the Walkmen a lot and I actually have a memory of having a dream and in the dream I saw the Walkmen perform with saxes.

Shangri-La is one of the few studios in which you can sit in the control room and open a window behind you. You can feel the light and the air coming off the ocean. You can have a musical world in front of you and the natural world behind you.

In the West we are constantly hit with music of Middle Eastern descent signifying terror, intrigue or sorrow.

I've had experiences where my life will try to tell me something in a dream and sometimes it's something I'm not ready to hear.

The original 'Don't Let It Get to You' started with a beat. The drums came first. All the musical and lyrical elements were written over those drums.

I think that all music is inherently political, and, at the same time, I'm interested in the politics of inclusion not exclusion. So I think that my goal is to make music that anybody can hear and feel moved by.

I think when I work with artists, I'm at their service, and I'm at the service of either their vision or a vision that we find together and we share.

I can pass as a lot of things: people meet me and don't think I'm gay and speak about gay people in a certain way or they don't know I'm Middle Eastern and do the same.