War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

If anyone is tweeting right now, I'm not pulling a knife on David Cronenberg!

I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

We are capitalism made flesh.

Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.