This kind of insight is the real reason I read the New York Times. I actually don't read the politics much. For American audiences a Holocaust movie is now more or less equivalent to a western or a combat picture or a sword-and-sandals epic—part of a genre that has less to do with history than with the perceived expectations of moviegoers. This may be the only, or at least the most widely available, way of keeping the past alive in memory, but it is also a kind of forgetting.[From Never...

Oh, Kristof! I've always liked you! Why do you have to think like so? An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.[From Op-Ed...