Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability. . . . It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave.

How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?

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.

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

Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard.

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

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.