Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were spectacular, riveting, grim, costly and searing. The shock that they caused reverberated throughout the world. What happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania ended the lives of thousands of people and changed the lives of many more. But they did not change the world.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.

The United States contributes to peace in both by serving as a buffer between and among regional powers that, while not preparing for armed conflict, do not fully trust one another.