Jacob Weisberg

I hope my children will grow up to love literature, but I expect they will absorb it as readily via a screen or pod as from glued quires of printed pages.

Members of the middle class do not have to worry about falling off $250,000 sailboats because they don't have $250,000 sailboats to fall off of.

The leader who loves books that tell him he is great and right may be worse than the leader who does not love books at all.

As far apart as they are theologically, Mormons and evangelical Christians may have more in common with each other anthropologically than they do with secular Americans watching 'Big Love' on HBO.

What ultimately makes 'The Wire' uplifting amid the heartbreak it conveys is its embodiment of a spirit that Barack Obama calls 'the audacity of hope.' It is filled with characters who should quit but don't, not only the boys themselves but teachers, cops, ex-cops, and ex-cons who lose their hearts to them.

In practice, conservatives are no less inclined than liberals to adopt superior stances or to tell people how to live their lives.

While 'The Wire' feels startlingly lifelike, it is not, in fact, a naturalistic depiction of ghetto life. That kind of realism better describes an earlier miniseries of Simon's, 'The Corner,' which was based on the book of the same title that he and Ed Burns wrote, set in the same Baltimore ghetto.

Whether couched in terms of envy, admiration, or derision, celebrity fascination begins as an exercise in imagining what it would be like to lead a more carefree and pleasurable life.

Most people prefer living in a healthier town.

Where the grifter is shameless, the grafter shrinks from exposure, which could only endanger the racket. He is greedy but not creatively ambitious. He toils in mundane self-dealing, insider trading, bribe taking, witness tampering, and other forms of workaday corruption.

Donald Trump is an archetypal grifter. Using the presidency to promote your golf courses, hotels, and real estate business is grifting. So is getting people to pay a premium for buildings with your name in big, gold letters. Licensing your name is what every grifter dreams about.

Both Left and Right take pleasure in mildly persecuting those who fail to meet their civic ideals.