Sublime

The violence allowed him to promulgate a clear story, which the mainland press reinforced. Reformers pursuing prosperity, like him, were rational. Nationalists, by contrast, were lunatics.

But free and open debate had not made his dreams come true. Instead, politicians had crushed them. And now he was going to make sure that, with the exception of Al Smith and Belle Moskowitz, no one—not citizenry, not press, not Legislature—was going to know what was in the bills dealing with parks that the Legislature was going to pass. The best bi

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A quixotic intellectual troubadour, he has prosecuted a series of discrete visions united only by a potent sense of curiosity and a provocative optimism.

WAR AND PEACE

my own favorite, Jonetix of Cupertino.

I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers’ retreat Xanadu, what he’d done during the war, which he called “civilization’s second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.”

I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare.