If you can't summarize an issue on one page, you don't understand the issue well enough.
Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person's life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader's style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented.
It's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.
We have the duty of formulating, of summarizing, and of communicating our conclusions, in intelligible form, in recognition of the right of other free minds to utilize them in making their own decisions.
I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.
Short form media is reductionist by nature.
A man, groundly learned already, may take much profit himself in using by epitome to draw other men’s works, for his own memory sake, into short room.
It's the fact that you can reduce my whole life to one word, whatever it is, my entire career, my service to my country, my academic rigor, my courage in going to interview terrorists, and refugee camps, and third-world prisons.
You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.
To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.
Part of my job is to make sense of all that I hear, and to retell it in a forceful way so that the decision-makers at Treasury can hear it. At least that's how I see it.
Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up. Once it's done, fortunately, it doesn't mean there's closure.
A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you're going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you're going all out.
I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you repeat what you've already said with phrases like 'In summation', and 'To conclude'.
