Gary Wills, a conservative, shakes his head at his native South: This is a region that rejects sex education, though its rate of teenage pregnancies is double and in places triple that of New England. It fights federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution. No part of the country will suffer the effects of global warming earlier or with more devastation than the South, yet its politicians resist measures to curb carbon emissions and... Read more

Andrew Sullivan, reacting to the president’s second inaugural: Over the years, I’ve never let go of that understanding of conservatism’s core truth – that all politics ends in some version of failure, that we cannot change and should not want to change the whole world over night, that constant failure is integral to human life and action – and the key spur to fleeting success. But I’ve also come to accept and more firmly believe that the flip-side to that... Read more

I just ate up this essay by Benjamin Kunkel at n+1. Chiefly it diagnoses the two main political strains with their corresponding pathologies (Republicans/conservatives are psychopaths and Democrats/liberals are neurotics, and I just can’t argue with that) but I found this encapsulation of the practice of politics to be troublingly spot-on: A tricky thing about this otherwise simple, not to say tedious game [of politics] is that it’s played at once by cynics and crazies, or people who are cynical... Read more