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Because you see these low-level foreign workers working two or three jobs, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, longing for home (a waiter shows me exactly how he likes to hold his two-year-old, or did like to hold her, last time he was home, eight months ago), and think: Couldn't you Haves cut l…

[...] It might be that one of the really significant problems of today's culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with each other across the divides of radical specialization. [...] a particular kind of genius that's not really part of their specific area of expertise …

[...] Everybody's pissed off and exasperated and impervious to arguments from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O'Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol,…

Again, this is funny and wily, but beneath it runs dread, the dread of nullity. For the book's persistent question is: If Adam Gordon were able to summon himself into authenticity, would there be anything to see? Are we in fact constituted by our inauthenticities? When Adam appears on a panel to di…

[...] "Which do you love more, your family or Albania?" Albania, of course, I told him. A family you can make overnight. You walk out of a coffee house, run into a woman on the corner, take her to a hotel, and boom--wife and children. But you can't make Albania overnight after a quick drink in a co…