The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent...The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.

Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

Political corruption is to Rhode Islanders as smog is to people who live in Los Angeles: nobody complains of its absence, but when it rolls around everyone feels right at home.

Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island’s flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci—a paragon of charisma and corruption.

I'm not pro-war. But I think war has been the dominant condition of humankind, and peace has been the anomaly - certainly sustained periods of peace that profit great masses of people - and I think war has worked, even awful hellish wars: worked to staunch fascist aggression in Europe, worked to preserve the Union after secession in the United States, etc. Not always, maybe not often, but to say never is to reject history in favor of a wishful unreality.

The photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.

What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.