Muss es sein?

Everyone knows that there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.  Nowhere is this more obvious than when interpreting survey results. In a March essay on America's political polarization in The New Republic , Bill Galston noted : above and beyond their ideological disagreements, conservatives and liberals have come to understand the practice of politics differently. In a survey taken right after the Republican sweep in the 2010 midterm elections, 47 percent of American said that it was more important to compromise in order to get things done, versus 27 percent who thought it was more important for leaders to stick to their beliefs even if little got done. Liberal Democrats weighed in on the side of compromise, 58 to 16, moderate Democrats by 64 to 17. But conservative Republicans (the overwhelming majority of their party) favored sticking to their beliefs by 45 to 26. Ten months later, after the debt ceiling fiasco, an outright majority of adults favored com...

Junot Diaz is coming to Houston next week to read from his latest collection of short stories .  Several weeks ago, his short story "The Cheater's Guide to Love" was published in The New Yorker , with the line, "The half-life of love is forever."  In an interview , Diaz said that he wanted to write a story about "those heartbreaks that never seem to leave us—that stay in us like radiation—those heartbreaks where getting over it becomes an epic battle with ourselves."  Of course, there are different ways of battling oneself.  One could say that the very struggle to overcome heartbreak is a battle with oneself.  But more interesting are those situations when we are ourselves are in some way the cause of our own heartbreak. There is a long tradition in ethics which holds that men's lives are directed towards the good.  What Diaz raises is the possibility that a life could become so broken that such direction becomes impossible, and that this broke...