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A good essay, like a good poem, is a complete thought. Books, I think, are food for thought but rarely constitute one themselves. The worst books are those that unnecessarily expand a thought that could have been fully expressed in a page or two. They are neither cogent nor nourishing. They are merely a distraction to occupy the mind when it is too tired to pay attention and too nervous to sleep. A complete thought isn't what we're taught in grade school. It isn't story elucidating a moral lesson. It isn't a symbol for something ineffable. It isn't a puzzle resolved by logic. It isn't an equation, a proof, a synthesis, or a paradox. A complete thought can't be reduced to anything more fundamental, and its parts have no meaning and no reality other than the continuous tension of the whole that runs through them. Science is obsessed with synthesizing thought, of separating thought from the source and observing it as an object. This obsession was, perhaps,...

There's been a lot of new slogans to help us cope with Trump's assault on smug and superior liberalism. One is attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts," which has been reduced to the slogan, "Facts matter. " We who are educated use facts to win arguments and have grown accustomed to shaming enemies simply by citing some authoritative source. But it's a strategy not so very different from religious orthodoxies citing scripture. Scientific facts and academic consensus are perhaps even less self-evident than religious dogma, and it should come as no surprise that the un-initiated at the margins of our cities and college campuses would one day simply refuse to accept our facts as valid and authoritative. But what really irritates the court and its educated courtiers is their refusal to play by the rules, to engage the Inquisition in the rational arguments designed to render the oppo...