Sublime

“It seems obvious that many charges made by reckless or impulsive public officials cannot and should not be ignored,” Hoyt wrote, “but it seems to me that news stories and headlines can be presented in such a manner that the reading public will be able to measure the real worth or value and the true meaning of the stories.”

The public smear campaign was coupled with financial harassment, controls on his movement, and physical violence, though not murder: the point was to scare him and to intimidate his followers, not to make him disappear altogether. Freedom House has called these kinds of campaigns “civil death.” In Zimbabwe, as in so many other places, they are

At the heart of our divisions is almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility. Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies: if anyone can become anything, today’s unequal results are fair and might well change tomorrow. That was never completely true, but now it’s plainly false.

As Richard Hofstadter, the Columbia University historian, wrote at the time, the “growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before,

Problem

Although he was largely an observer of the technical community that created Silicon Valley, his various ideas and crusades around the Whole Earth Catalog, which he created in the fall of 1968, foreshadow and resonate with the techno-utopian culture that the Valley spawned.

truculent

Tocqueville

The director of mission operations was sitting in front of the camera stroking his iPad. He didn’t seem to be aware that the camera was on.