Younger people - not just older people - holding this basic underlying attitude that's suggested there that women aren't worth much, that they're property, that just about anything can be done with them.
Here is a needle President Obama needs to thread if he chooses a ninth. The nominee would need to be so strongly qualified that he or she would be hard to reject. The person must also be willing to be nominated even though leading Senate Republicans have said they will not consider anyone the president names.
The New York Times reports that [Donald] Trump wants [Jared] Kushner in the White House, and he's exploring whether he can take a position. It's problematic, though, because even an unpaid job could fall under a law prohibiting nepotism.
Donald Trump places great faith in his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
When I choose the picture of the cover of the book 'Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi', I thought, gosh, many people in Karachi may not like this image; I'm representing the city as a burning bus. But to the contrary, they loved it, because that is people's understanding of their own city, of going on with life no matter what.
So many awful things have happened in Karachi, it's true. It has its own crazy rhythm. Even as crazy as other news is in Pakistan, the city manages to beat that in the frequency of catastrophes.
When I go to American cities and speak to American audiences about Karachi, I am able to draw their own wonder and consternation about the cities they live in as an entry point to this other faraway, instant city.
I have reported enough about Islam and terrorism to recognize that a lot of what is at stake is not strictly religion, even though it's also about power and control. In the case of Karachi, like so many other growing cities, it's also about land, mafias, gang activity.
I see parallels between Karachi and the cities that I was familiar with: a very different place, but in terms of its human stories not really very different at all. That was what excited me about the place - that it was so complex, as difficult to me as an outsider and yet so human in a way that was ultimately very familiar.
I would say that the one incredible thing that Karachi has going for it is the unabated supply of new migrants that pour into it day after day. It could be a poor factory worker who simply wants a job, it could be an ambitious guy coming for an education - they all add hope and vibrancy to the city. Now, this is not something that is generally taken as positive in Karachi. But the hope is that the migration that comes into the city replenishes its stores of resilience and energy.
People don't know where they stand and what they're going to lose, and that makes things uncertain. The political parties try to meld people together, but then that becomes a problem. There are parallels here, to American cities, which, in the '80s, with massive rural to urban migration, saw incredible amounts of violence.
You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, "My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened." And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked.
Let me name three of the people who influenced me, although it's definitely not a complete list. Ayesha Jalal, the formidable Pakistani-American historian, has rigorously re-evaluated Jinnah's political strategies leading up to Partition. Akbar Ahmed, a former diplomat and now a distinguished scholar, has documented Jinnah's life as a man who welcomed, worked with, and even married people of other faiths. And then there is Ardeshir Cowasjee, the great Parsi newspaper columnist, who in his mid-80s is a kind of living history of all of Pakistan, old enough to have known Jinnah himself.
President-elect Trump has said he would like to improve relations with Russia. His choice for defense secretary views Russia as America's number one threat.
The president-elect seems to want Russia as a friend. President Obama arguably has not wanted to say that Russia is that great of a threat.
The Kremlin, this cadre of people supporting Vladimir Putin, and Vladimir Putin himself understand is strength, is resolve.
Putin himself is a bit of a risk taker, so the invading Ukraine, in the east in particular - Crimea was risky.
We need to be stronger. We need to deter the Russians. We need to show resolve, which is why cooperating with them on the other hand can be more difficult.
The Republican critique here is that Russia is in a weak situation, but has been emboldened by a weak response from the United States, that in Ukraine, that in other places, the United States has not stepped forward.
Tradition has to be retaken by the liberal forces, so that they can show their values of tolerance and democracy not as novel western ideas but as ones indigenous to Pakistan, as a part of its very creation.
People who want a different Pakistan have to find a way to go back into their own past and revive the vision of their founders, that was clearly a tolerant and diverse one, so that they can distinguish it from the one that has been imposed upon it. If they can do that, they can take back this city and their country.
Identity liberalism, as I understand it, is expressive rather than persuasive.
[Identity liberalism] is about recognition and self-definition. It's narcissistic. It's isolating. It looks within. And it also makes two contradictory claims on people.
[Identity liberalism] says, on the one hand, you can never understand me because you are not exactly the kind of person I've defined myself to be. And on the other hand, you must recognize me and feel for me. Well, if you're so different that I'm not able to get into your head and I'm not able to experience or sympathize with what you experience, why should I care?
Is that really the issue [of bathrooms and gender] we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.
