Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.
David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II... See more
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
These unhappy times call for the building of plans that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
Jean Edward Smith • FDR
now it’s clear that all the important trends began in the seventies. It was the end of postwar, middle-class, bipartisan America.
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.”