Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.

Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.

History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.

What stalwart Republican would stop Trump from profiteering for his businesses from the White House the way he's gamed his companies and the tax code for decades, or prevent him from letting his adult children milk their father's position to benefit his supposed 'blind trust?'

My father, Melvin van Peebles, and my mother were both very active politically when I was a kid. The first time I was allowed to stay up late was to attend a demonstration.

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.