Even at the end of a presidential election campaign, we have no way to know what Mitt Romney really believes.

There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.

All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees - famously in recent years at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the three original TV networks.