an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric

I am acting as an evaluative filter, winnowing a very large field of possibilities down to a manageable absorbale Best for your delectation

I hear the caviling voices

my Decidering function is anentropic and therefore mostly exclusionary

I don't care much for abreactive or confessional memoirs

tired of the legerdemain of collapsing the word's neutral meaning--"preference, inclination"--into the pejorative one of "unfairness stemming from prejudice"

the sort of magical compression that enriches instead of vitiates

which is not exactly belletristic but certainly isn't written in aureate academese

several of this year's Best Essays are arguably more like causeries or propos than like essay per se

Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004's reelection could have taken place--not to mention extraordinary rendition, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the passage of the Military Commissions Act--if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. "We" meaning as a polity and culture. The premise does not entail specific blame; or rather the problems here are too entangled and systemic for good old-fashioned finger-pointing. It is, for one example, simplistic and wrong to blame the for-profit media for somehow failing to make clear to us the moral and practial hazards of trashing the Geneva Conventions. The for-profit media is exquisitely attuned to what we want and the amount of detail we'll sit still for. [...] You'd simply drown. We all would. It's amazing to me that no one much talks about this--about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by "informed."

we, like diminished kings or rigidly insecure presidents, are reduced to being overwhelmed by info and interpretation, or else paralyzed by cynicism and anomie, or else--worst--seduced by some particular set of dogmatic talking-points, whether these be PC or NRA, rationalist or evangelical, "Cut and Run" or "No Blood for Oil"