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I'm also a big Bob Dylan fan. The songs on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - which is one of his best early albums - they grow out of some of his difficulties with Suze Rotolo, and "Hard Rain," people say it had to do with the Cuban missile crisis - probably not. He denied it. I believe him, but it certainly had to do with the time.
Cass Sunstein -
Well, I've liked Star Wars since the late '70s. I liked it a lot.
Cass Sunstein
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If you take anything that succeeded, just imagine it succeeding 10 years before or 10 years after, you could almost always make, with the same plausibility, the "it fit the times" argument.
Cass Sunstein -
I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.
Cass Sunstein -
Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can't take their own side in an argument.
Cass Sunstein -
I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.
Cass Sunstein -
So, you could often say things are terrible and that accounts for what happened, or things are really bright, and that accounts for what happened. Often, the real explanation for what happened is much more subtle and interesting and involves maybe small shocks or what a couple people did on a Wednesday morning that changed the arc of history.
Cass Sunstein -
I have argued in favor of a reformulation of First Amendment law. The overriding goal of the reformulation is to reinvigorate processes of democratic deliberation, by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views.
Cass Sunstein
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It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong.
Cass Sunstein -
The hero of the beloved Star Wars trilogy is Luke. The principle dynamic is the complicated relationship between Luke and his father. Not coincidentally, George Lucas' last name sounds a lot like Luke. That's the one he identified with. George Lucas had a tumultuous relationship with his own father, and people who know him say that you can't understand the backstory of the movies without knowing that his dad was occasionally difficult but also very loving. They had a big break between them. In those movies, he's very focused on sons and fathers.
Cass Sunstein -
My role in the government was not to think about narratives and consistency with narratives, but think of the human consequences of rules.
Cass Sunstein -
The idea that Taylor Swift would become the giant pop icon of 2015, 2016 - she's really good, but I don't think it's written in the stars.
Cass Sunstein -
Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate.
Cass Sunstein -
Those who believe in climate change, as I do, I think it's also fair to say that they are more receptive to confirming evidence than disconfirming evidence. They happen to be right, but their motivations are in play also.
Cass Sunstein
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Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.
Cass Sunstein -
As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.
Cass Sunstein -
There is no proportional representation requirement in the Equal Protection Clause
Cass Sunstein -
I love The Matrix, especially the first one.
Cass Sunstein -
On reflection, some things do super well because they hit with the time. Some things do super well because they are able to activate a kind of echo chamber or bandwagon or cascade - they didn't particularly hit with the time. Some things are just too astonishingly good to not hit the top. Those three explanations, with respect to the Star Wars phenomenon, seem to me all to pass the plausibility test, and to explore them, with respect to Star Wars, I think casts light not just on the saga of our time, but also on everything about our culture.
Cass Sunstein -
For the Sanders supporters, there's a thought that the people who are well off are doing really great, and the system is systematically unfair, and that's a very deeply felt and serious objection to the current situation.
Cass Sunstein
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If you have a regulation that's going to save hundreds of thousands of lives annually and not cost very much, that sounds like a very good idea.
Cass Sunstein -
The U.S. is blessed with tremendously creative and imaginative law students at places like Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale.
Cass Sunstein -
Sometimes, the word 'voluntary' is a little complicated.
Cass Sunstein -
I think a lot of the Trump supporters think that the job situation is not good.
Cass Sunstein