Raised in a house filled with old books, I'm drawn to them: the dust jackets that call out a historical moment, the marbled boards, the words pressed into the page with movable type.
It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights.
The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic.
Nearly everyone who chooses to work for Donald Trump is disreputable in one way or another; Ali Baba didn't find 40 wise men in the cave. But to label everyone in Trumpworld a grifter misses important subtleties. It conflates grifters and grafters, and it ignores the crucial distinction between the two.
Closely allied to the assumption that Democrats can't win because they're too secular is the view that they can't win if they're too liberal. This assumption has steered Hillary Clinton toward the center, following her husband. I tend to share this view myself.
Being editor of 'Slate' is the best job I've ever had because of the freedom and support given to me by Don Graham and the Post Co. and because of the opportunity to work with colleagues I admire and adore.
As with the government failures that made 9/11 possible, neglecting to prevent the crash of '08 was a sin of omission - less the result of deregulation per se than of disbelief in financial regulation as a legitimate mechanism.
American liberals are an external part of Israel's conscience, and when it disdains them, it becomes a harder and more isolated place. The support that Israel has gained from millenarian American conservatives is no substitute, in part because such allies aren't persuasive global advocates for Israel.
The cradle-to-grave welfare state diminishes individual initiative and can breed a pervasive sclerosis.
Because conscription appeals to essentially no one, the United States has lived with the All-Volunteer Force since the end of the Vietnam War.
Americans are defined by a history of immigration in pursuit of freedom and opportunity. We are more individualistic, enterprising, and protective of liberties that most Europeans do not expect, such as owning guns, working 70-hour weeks, or appreciating nature as it goes by at 60 mph on a snowmobile.
Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the Right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history.
Unlike the Japanese internment, water-boarding was ordered and served up in secret. But it, too, was America's policy, not just Dick Cheney's. Congress was informed about what was happening and raised no objection. The public knew, too.
Paradoxically, I think working at an Internet magazine intensifies the attraction of beautiful printed objects.
Southern conservatives care about government's moral stance but don't mind when it spends freely on behalf of their constituents. Western conservatives, by contrast, are soft-libertarians who want government out of people's way on principle.
Where the grifter is shameless, the grafter shrinks from exposure, which could only endanger the racket. He is greedy but not creatively ambitious. He toils in mundane self-dealing, insider trading, bribe taking, witness tampering, and other forms of workaday corruption.
If you want to go around saying that giving women the vote wrecked the country and still be taken seriously, it helps to be handing out $100 bills.
People tend to throw up hands at Michael Jackson's multifarious bizarreness. But is it really so strange? The boy was forced to work by a cruel and physically abusive father starting at the age of 7.