Sublime

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

some hopeful tune the rest of us couldn’t hear,

We subscribe to these supposedly important stories, religious stories, and we ignore their inanity, how moronic and impractical they are. Can we prove the stories don’t make us sick? Because they happened long before we were born, we somehow decide they are extraordinarily important and we shut our brains down, we turn into imbeciles, we let the pa

There were a few outliers in this discussion, like the Yale professor Harold Bloom and the British trial lawyer Anthony Julius. But those who thought the play was irredeemably antisemitic were, the consensus went, vulgar and whiny—and, completely coincidentally, they were also Jewish, which somehow magically invalidated their opinions on this subje

As I walked home down the steep slope of Fulton Street afterward, I thought: This is like a synagogue, but without Jews or Judaism. Like many things nowadays, the seculars have reinvented a religious concept to cope with the very barrenness that secularism bequeathed us.

A majority of self-styled secularists led the State of Israel, fought in its armies, tilled its soil. In the eyes of many secular and religious Jews, any state so obviously brought into being by human activity, a state often not observant of Jewish traditional practices, a state manifestly vulnerable and full of flaws, could not define itself as a

But in the world of satisfying stories—her preferred domain—both of Olivia’s parents are so much less than they should have been.