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Much has been made in recent weeks of the shared birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two juggernauts not only of their own age, but of all the years since. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik explores their legacies in this book-length series of essays, focusing on their abilities as writers and thinkers of the highest caliber. As Gopnik writes, "Literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance." With their adherence to logic and observation, and devotion to thoughtful expression, Lincoln and Darwin - in addition to everything...
...origin of Lincoln's facility with words: "The frontier America of Lincoln's youth was first of all a rhetorical society, where the ability to speak in public, at length was central to social ambitions; giving a speech in 1838 in Illinois was the equivalent of putting on a play in 1598 in London, the thing you did into which everything else flowed. (We are, by turn - and a writer says it with sadness - essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can't play the image game...
...What was not considered at any length in the Treasury presentation is how fast the money can be moved onto bank balance sheets and into facilities that can free up consumer and business spending. The phase used is always "immediately", but that may be a long time depending on the flexibility of the bureaucracy that has to handle the funds...
...Monday evening. When I stepped off of my train, Union Station was swarming with people, completely transformed from the last and only time I had ever been in Washington, D.C., four years ago. It was 9:40 PM, and the place was a hub of activity: women in floor-length coats, college-age kids milling around, and swarms of police guarding gates. I had made it. I had packed up my room at Harvard two days before, spent less than 24 hours at home, and now had made my dream of being in Washington D.C. to see this inauguration come...
...celebrate. But I've been a pretty good member and I've worked hard and I've gotten a lot of legislation through. I've done a lot of things for the people I serve and for the country. I'd rather be remembered for that than for the length of time I've served...