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.

I feel like I've had this ability to infiltrate, as an outsider and an insider, different groups.

I'm not interested in anyone who would want me for the wrong reasons.

I was fascinated by the word 'Rudy,' which is connected to the Jamaican term 'rude boy,' which migrated from Jamaica to London. I was also fascinated by that name, because it exists in Persian culture and Iranian culture. There is actually a place called Rudy in Iran, and there's Iranians that I know with the name Rudy.

When I work with other artists, I really want to bring out the most in their voices and I want to hold myself to the same standard.

On the song 'Step,' the chorus is Ezra is singing into my laptop with the laptop microphone, and you can hear the trains going by my apartment, but we liked the quality of that recording.

I would hope to make a record that interacts with culture in a macro sense. That is something to aspire to.

Well, the announcement to say that I was no longer a member of Vampire Weekend was something that was in the works for a long time. I knew that it was the right choice for me.

I think that's the only way I know how to write songs, is to think about my life, and also to think about the words at the same time.

I never felt like there were things I couldn't express lyrically in Vampire Weekend. I was always proud of everything that we wrote together.

I thought it would be interesting to play classical music on rock instruments.

I love being able to record in a room that's surrounded by trees.

You want the personality of each performer - whether it's singing or bass or drums or piano - to be intact. In some ways it's much more challenging to preserve that and to also make music that sounds modern.

There are rules that are so blatantly broken on 'Contra,' like structures of harmony and texture.

Radio or no radio, I just like the way records sound when the drums and vocals are loud.

It doesn't matter if you record with a microphone on a laptop or at a friend's house. Now it's more of a danger of things sounding too high-fi than sounding too low-fi.

I always felt more connected with people who are proud of who they are.

There is a sense of tranquility that I think people can get from being in an organized group, where a singular leader handles the responsibilities of individual thinking.

I like to be able to work quickly, to capture the spark of an idea before it goes out.

There's a joy I get from collaborating with other artists, and there's a joy I get from making songs on my own.