Free Republic

That mean old clock on the wall doesn't tend to be particularly kind to leaders and entrepreneurs, so big surprise, companies that offer cliffs notes, abridged or otherwise easy-to-digest versions of books are soaring in popularity. These certainly aren't all bad, since they can help you quickly understand what the main point of a text is or let you jog your memory about it. They have their place. But if you're going to read a book, please just read the real, whole book already, at least most of the time. There are valuable reasons not to skip even one...

So, what, really, is the message out of Iowa? Yawn. (SNIP) Marco Rubio finished third — and acted as though he’d carried the day. The mysterious “they” who so often act as disdainful naysayers to young idealists everywhere had told him such a showing in Iowa was impossible because he offered too much hope, Rubio said — before racing for the rhetorical refuge of his hysterically overwrought stump speech portraying the 2016 election as a make-or-break moment between national greatness and national decline.

AT NINE o'clock on the morning of September 11th 2001, President George Bush sat in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, listening to seven-year-olds read stories about goats. “Night fell on a different world,” he said of that day. And on a different America. At first, America and the world seemed to change together. “We are all New Yorkers now,” ran an e-mail from Berlin that day, mirroring John F. Kennedy's declaration 40 years earlier, “Ich bin ein Berliner”, and predicting Le Monde's headline the next day, “Nous sommes tous Américains”. And America, for its part, seemed to become more...