Sublime

Expecting capitalists to refrain from gobbling up the earth is like blaming Pac-Man for gulping down pac-dots—to them, that’s what land is for.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

I was expecting a wealth of amateur historians, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the fur trade and fresh insights to borrow, but the first twenty people I talked to had never heard of Joe Walker. Reading history books, it turned out, was not a popular

This influence always went far beyond our ability to impose our will. It’s strongest where no coercion is involved. Our culture has a pervasive reach beyond anything the British Empire or Soviet internationalism or the French mission civilisatrice achieved—this in spite of Americans’ unwillingness to live abroad. Gilbert and Sullivan did not catch