Paul Avery: Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into footnote... Not that I haven't been sitting here idly, waiting for you to dr...
Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every ...
We all know how it went when Europe changed from a culture addicted to depressants to one high on stimulants [...] Within two hundred years of Europe's first cup, famine and the plague were historical footnotes. Governments became more democratic, sl...
After we’re feasted down to white sticks and it’s all covered in lions and trees and whatever the monkeys become prod the ground with a toe, staring down with glittering eyes at the guts of a wristwatch. After the bonfires and sun worship and the...
God's M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can't perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs....
... a man could build whatever monuments he wanted in the worlds of politics, sports, entertainment, and business, but if they come at the expense of his children, then he has failed. Once the attention fades and the crowds stop cheering his name and...
Whether he chooses a 'scholarly' or a 'popular' edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice that a given text...
