Sublime

The lawyers speak to the other jurors. They speak to the banker's wife. They speak to the schoolteacher in the back row. They speak to the manager of a local chain store. They speak to the lineman for the electric company. But they do not speak much to her. Yet who knows more about the human condition than she? Who knows more about sorrow and pover

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

For ten years, the Times’s Berlin bureau under Enderis took the soft tack on the Nazi regime, whitewashing its crimes and downplaying its dangerousness, all the while leading the American public, hungry for information about the new Germany, down a deadly path. That

American power should be used to protect and spread American principles. At the root of this position is the view that the United States has an obligation to itself and the world to advocate and defend the moral principles on which it was founded, and the belief that behaving like any other country and defending its economic and strategic interests

Plenty of politicians come from the working class—Palin never left it. She went after Obama with particular venom. Her animus was fueled by his suspect origins, radical associates, and redistributionist views, but the worst offense was his galling mix of class and race. Obama was a Black professional who had gone to the best schools, knew so much m

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process”, or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who repor