Sublime

Its preachers claimed that these ancient writings were not art, the imaginative expression of enduring truths about the human condition. They were reports of events that happened precisely as they were described,

“The modest and cordial young fellow who passed through New York a few weeks ago with his mother will never be known outside the circle of his mourning friends,” commented John Hay in a touching obituary written for the New York Tribune. “But ’little Tad’ will be remembered as long as any live who bore a personal share in the great movements whose

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian culture becomes a prison. In the second, the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countena

Russert, like Cramer, when exposed as complicit in the dissemination of misinformation, attempted to portray himself as an innocent victim, as did New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who, along with her colleague Michael Gordon, worked largely as stenographers for the Bush White House during the propaganda campaign to invade Iraq. Once the adminis

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Self-sacrifice is extremely persuasive not just for the martyrs themselves but also for their bystanders. Few gods, nations, or revolutions can sustain themselves without martyrs. If you presume to question the divine drama, the nationalist myth, or the revolutionary saga, you are immediately chastised: “But the blessed martyrs died for this! Do yo

myth of the white man’s burden from the days of the British Empire,

The profound contempt that the British so openly expressed for Indian Muslim and Mughal culture proved contagious, particularly to the ascendant Hindus, who quickly hardened their attitudes to all things Islamic, but also to many young Muslims, who now believed that their own ancient and much-cherished civilisation had been irretrievably discredite

Over and over again, however, the British found it possible to justify such brutal war crimes with the quasi-religious reasoning that they were somehow handing out God’s justice on men who were not men, but were instead more like devils. In the eyes of Victorian Evangelicals, mass murder was no longer mass murder, but instead had become divine veng