Newark might be one of few the places where the politics is tougher than even Brooklyn.

During my time as a state legislator, I've pushed for significant investment in public school districts. In Congress, I would look forward to increasing federal public investment in education through initiatives like Race to the Top.

The political process is rough and tumble by definition, and being grounded in faith in a Higher Power has proven helpful in navigating the difficult terrain.

My job in Congress is to identify projects with federal or some other public component and then to push developers to provide employment opportunities to neighborhood residents.

To the game code, the world is still just a tile map, but for rendering, each map was exported as a general-purpose 3D model, and the artists could then go through it and spend the polygons any way they liked, without the limits of line-of-constant-z software rasterization that we lived with on the mobile phones.

I live in England, so I take a lot of trains, and you can't really go anywhere without somebody talking on their mobile phone behind you, forcing you to listen to their conversation. With the Internet, with texting, with networking sites, there's already information everywhere.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.