Most people in the ancient world, in fact, not just Jews, would have supposed that legitimacy came, ultimately, from what you did in office, not from the method by which you got there.
Why Hope Isn’t Always a Good Thing
Hope isn’t wishful thinking. It’s full of requirements.
Politics After the Apocalypse
If all the libraries in the world were destroyed and you could save only two books of political theory, which would they be?
100 Days Citizen Test
On President Obama’s hundredth day: five questions for citizens.
RCB Bookmarks, Mid-January, 2009
Links on culture, reading, and the web.
Exhilaration, Exhaustion, Tennyson
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur
Intermission Music
“I have to admit, it’s getting better…”
Wisdom versus Winning
After all this, is your world not larger than it was before? Show me you both are looking for wisdom and understanding, rather than victory.
Letter to a Young Voter
It’s late in the election cycle, and I do not know if you have yet registered to vote, but I exhort you as my fellow citizen, my political friend, to go and vote. And after that, to participate in other ways, by reading, commenting, contributing, serving, listening, speaking, advocating. Politics grows from the practice of everyday life in the presence of strangers and friends. It doesn’t matter whether you have everything figured out yet — just participate. Be devoted — make a sacrifice of devotion — to the city and nation in which you have found yourself. They are your family, and they need you.
Another Halloween
It’s that time of year again, when our culture takes a holiday originating in fall harvest and the passing of generations, and turns it into a celebration of imagination, childhood, community, misrule, aggression, terror, & trauma (as well as another opportunity for a capitalist binge).
My Kind of Expert
“The very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting.”
Math Against Tyranny — Understanding the Electoral College
“Experts, scholars, deep thinkers could make errors on electoral reform,” Alan Natapoff decided, “but nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.”