Barack Obama. On a daily basis he faced racism, and I admire him for trying to push through that to better his nation.

Thomas Pynchon, for his sentences.

Mo Farah represents everything that’s great about our country.

Greta Thunberg. She has reached into the hearts and minds of people all over the world and woken them up to the terrible impact we are having on our planet. What a fascinating force of nature she is.

That human beings are selfish. I don’t believe it. We have angels and monsters inside each of us. What we need to do better as a society is create systems and opportunities to bring out our most generous.

One of the biggest lessons of my life, Krista, has been that we can’t separate the world into monsters and angels and that there’s nothing like loving people and knowing friends who played different roles in the genocide, including being perpetrators, that makes you have to confront that most raw element of what it means to be human. And the only conclusion I could make was that there are monsters and angels in each of us and that those monsters really are our broken parts — they’re our insecurities; they’re our fears; they’re our shames — and that in times of insecurity, it becomes really easy for demagogues to prey on those broken parts and sometimes make us do terrible things to each other.

On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. ... Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.

It is usually 4 or 5 in the morning so I go downstairs and make tea and then read a bit of poetry – Mary Oliver, Rumi, Hafiz, Seamus Heaney, Yeats, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Rilke are among my favorites…

Email. Or call a good friend. Reading this reminds me that I should instead read poetry. Or write.

But the book I give right now in this time of so much despair is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, where he really looks at people in the Holocaust and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumple up and die and others stayed resilient and strong? And that at the end of the day, no one can take our dignity away from us.