My dad grew up in Nicaragua in his teenage years, then immigrated to the United States.

I was the third parent, growing up, and it did make me a very overly responsible adult.

I still remember, at the age of 12, learning that segregation had been permitted only a couple of decades before I was born and that a woman's right to vote was not even a century old. But it was great Americans who stood up, some dying for the cause, to make our country better.

Detroit can become a national model for urban revitalization, but to do so, it must break free from past development models.

The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books - mine included - because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened.

I like the outdoors and the natural world. Environmental issues.

There is good evidence that Venus once had liquid water and a much thinner atmosphere, similar to Earth billions of years ago. But today the surface of Venus is dry as a bone, hot enough to melt lead, there are clouds of sulfuric acid that reach a hundred miles high and the air is so thick it's like being 900 meters deep in the ocean.

I think we are all interested in end-times ideas and also in the current climate that we are all living in, where money is a little harder to come by, things continue to get expensive; gas prices are not too far from people's heads. There are more and more people. Human society's going to have real problems.