I've rarely gotten a good review in my life, yet, to paraphrase Noel Coward, I am happy to console myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success.

The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of peoples lives.

The spectacle of insensitivity that is the gun lobby and its outspoken, out-of-their-mind apparatchiks, is the apotheosis of what the Republican Party has allowed itself to become.

Social media has created a legion of social delinquents, billions of people speaking not their minds but their spleens, venting everything from the gum-cracking snark befitting a hair-twisting mallrat to the froth-flecked rage of a bell tower marksman.

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that those who see hints of a new class ideology developing around information technology are not necessarily wild-eyed. "Bit-twiddlers" are neither exactly proletariat nor bourgeoisie. They may not own the means of production in the sense that Marx argued, but they certainly do have significantly control over those means, in a more profound way than the term "symbols analysts" or "knowledge workers" captures. As a rough generalization, they value science and technological problem-solving elegance equally at least with profit.

If you have to lie, cheat, steal, obstruct and bully to get your point across, it must not be a point capable of surviving on its own merits.

From the moment America went full-on industrial, it seems like it's been a steady path towards people never having to be physically present in order to satisfy their needs.