The New Yorker

Tomorrow is the funeral for Aaron Swartz, the programmer and sometime activist who killed himself last Friday, while facing federal trial. No one knows, or will ever really know, what caused Swartz to take his own life. But his suicide, in the face of possible bankruptcy and serious prison time, has created a moment of clarity. We can rightly judge a society by how it treats its eccentrics and deviant geniuses—and by that measure, we have utterly failed.

New York can be as compelling in a hurricane as it is on a starry Saturday night. Some of the thrill of living in the city arises from its combination of majesty and vulnerability. Coming to terms with apocalyptic scenes is easier here than in other cities because the scenes have already been imagined, scripted and filmed by Hollywood’s dystopian directors. We step outside this week as if onto a familiar movie set.

The final Presidential debate, devoted to foreign policy, was the most reasoned and the least polluted by rehearsed talking points of the three. The format and the moderator helped: the candidates sat side by side at a table, close to Bob Schieffer, of CBS News, who conducts interviews of this kind every Sunday morning on “Face the Nation”; his confidence showed, and the roundtable feeling seemed to calm everyone down.

In 2011, as the Presidential campaign got under way, Paul Ryan posed for Time, curling barbells during a P90X workout, with his baseball cap turned backward and his ear buds in, ready for some heavy metal. The magazine had considered naming him Person of the Year, for his sudden rise to radical prominence in the House of Representatives.

In “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” an essay published in 1990, the historian Bernard Lewis describes a “surge of hatred” rising from the Islamic world that “becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such.” The thesis became influential. It posited a crisis within a global Islamic community that made conflict with the United States and Europe inevitable. Academics and policymakers expanded on these ideas after September 11th, which brought urgently to the fore questions about how Al Qaeda’s radical ideas should be understood in relation to wider, diverse Muslim thought.

During the kerosene-lamp era, political conventions were magnificent festivals of “honest work and base trickery,” enlivened by delegates who could be “violent, vituperative and malignant,” as a Times account of the Republican Convention of 1880 put it. Well into the twentieth century, Presidential nominees were chosen at the Conventions, and they remained newsmaking extravaganzas. Television’s arrival heightened the drama: John F.

There is really only one plausible scenario in which Republicans could enact some version of Paul Ryan’s radical, government-shrinking budget plan during the next two years. That would be if Mitt Romney wins the White House and Republicans eke out control of the Senate in November. (The Democrats now hold the Senate by a 53-47 margin.)