If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.