Sublime

bathos

The narrative and the numbers concept gives us a way to test our intuition about what might appear to fit but in fact is contradictory—in other words, it helps us fine-tune our gut feel about things that don’t seem quite right.

Character is not measured by a person’s beliefs but by the ability to see the full humanity of others. It is not automatic. It’s a skill acquired slowly. It’s about being able to focus on what’s going on in your own mind and simultaneously focus on what’s going on in another mind. It’s about learning how to minutely observe, absorb and resonate

I am fortunate to count several tremendous sportswriters as friends, and this concept—legacy—is something we’ve broached at length. It’s actually (in a way) one of the flaws of the medium. When one writes the story of an era, he is charged not with dishing out hagiography, but an honest, sincere, detailed recollection of a period. In doing so,

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact—observable, discernible, undeniable fact.

The secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the

Look for the Best in Everybody