For any reporter, education is a topic where everything else - money, politics, et cetera - intersects. I have four kids in K through 12, so I'm knee-deep in it. I'm really interested in the philosophy behind it all. Should you just memorize your multiplication tables, or should you understand the concept behind them?

My trademark at CNN was really asking insightful questions and making sure people are understanding the connections in humanity, and I think that is the core of education.

I have a philosophy that white people would be interested in Native Americans because, first of all, it's probably the only group as a country we all study and know the history and then never study again past the age of 10. So I think we have these things we believe are true, that are just not true about what an audience wants.

I covered Katrina, I've covered the tsunamis, all of them, the Haiti earthquake... you get to a certain point in your career where you say, 'I want to now cover what I want to cover.'

I really love 'Cold Song.' If anyone really listens to that song and thinks about their life, there's a lot of good material deep down in there. I think if you listen to the lyrics, it may take you on some sort of a journey.

We're all living in a casino. It's just Vegas. Everything is on camera. Everything is being recorded. Everything is on audio. The truth is we all have access to everybody else's information.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

I say all the time I think there should be some courses in the regular schooling system that isn't, even like about credit, things that matter later in life. I learned the harder way: 'Look, I got a $500 credit card in the mail, let's go shopping!'