I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Americans complain a lot about the government and they voice a generalized suspicion of the government, but they constantly clammer for more of it.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.

Republicans, supposed defenders of limited government, actually are enablers of an unlimited presidency. Their belief in strict construction of the Constitution evaporates, and they become, in behavior if not in thought, adherents of the woolly idea of a 'living Constitution.' They endorse, by their passivity, the idea that new threats justify ignoring the Framers' text and logic about shared responsibility for war-making.