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In the early 20th-century, Edmund Wilson Jr. thought he could glimpse the emergence of a genuinely American literary form. This has got to be it: Harlequin NASCAR. [HT: my old friend Jeff Dudiak]

I found Bob Herbert’s editorial in today’s NYT striking and disturbing. In the wake of the murders in Newark, NJ, he notes that since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly 100,000 Americans have been murdered. He notes the irony of selective outrage: At the same time that we’re diligently confiscating water and toothpaste from air travelers, we’re…

While driving across southern Virginia last week, we came across an incredible–and incredibly disturbing–billboard. As part of a tourist campaign commemorating the 400th anniversay of the “first landing” in 1607, the billboard featured a Native American man. Beside him were the words, “Their sacrifice made our nation great,” and the man is wearing a black…

The Hilton Family of Hotels has launched a “be hospitable” campaign (just as heiress Paris has been welcomed into a slightly different hotel in southern California). The idea–which is a crass example of “welfare” marketing, selling a product by being “good”–is to compile and record random acts of hospitality around the country, all in the…

I’m a tad alarmed at how often I now find myself agreeing with David Brooks. He offers a nice apologia for the “quasi-religious,” who inhabit a world between Pat Robertson and Richard Dawkins. He ends a recent column with this nice credo: Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more…

Two pieces this morning that deserve wide attention: Jacques Berlinbau (author of The Secular Bible) has penned a stinging critique of Hitchens’ God is Not Good in the Chronicle of Higher Education. What makes it interesting is that Berlinbau is a committed, nuanced, and articulate secularist. Jonathan Freedland’s piece, “Bush’s Amazing Achievement” in the most…