When I was a boy in Desuq, Egypt, a city on the Rosetta branch of the Nile, about 50 miles east of Alexandria, my family lived steps away from the local landmark, a mosque named for a 13th-century Sufi sheik.
In terms of finding that first international recognition of my work, coming back to Cannes is such a milestone in my life because it began actually with 'Devdas'.
As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, I've logged more than 5,000 miles driving across the country to see first-hand how digital technologies are unleashing opportunity in U.S. communities and to understand the connectivity challenges many Americans face.
We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.
Later, in the early teens, I used to ride my bike every Saturday morning to the nearest airport, ten miles away, push airplanes in and out of the hangars, and clean up the hangars.
It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.
As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.
I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.
St. Louis still is going to be a special place for me, whether I'm playing 3,000 miles away or 5,000 miles away.
Tires were so bald on the truck that the air was showin' through, and I had to drive fifty miles an hour all the way out there, because the vibration was so bad.
