Great interview...will read the new book soon. This response, though, I’ll use in my class sooner rather than later.

To what extent can a person reinvent herself far from her origins? 

I would begin by emphasising that leaving is not betraying one’s origins. Rather, we have to leave in order to assign origins and establish them as the foundation of our growth. Wandering, we transform our bodies into crowded warehouses. New materials weigh on the original ones, modifying them by merging with them, blending with them. We ourselves seesaw between various ways of being, sometimes enriching our identity, sometimes impoverishing it by subtraction. But our birthplace endures. It’s the ground upon which our primary experiences stand, where we first exercise our gaze, first imagine, first express ourselves. And the more solid we find that ground to be, the more varied is our experience of elsewhere…

This piece will be helpful when we do our museum of foreign policy in the spring.

Great piece in The Guardian:

This paragraph…

Admit it: many of you skimmed the last dense sentence, or perhaps everything so far. You sought the information quickly without expending extra time on reflecting further. If so, you missed two opportunities: to examine the basis for the statements, and to propel your own thoughts. That’s because you skimmed, browsed or word-spotted – with no consciousness that in so doing your brain has already begun changing, just as your child’s more malleable brain will.