What does ‘evil’ look like in a morally relativistic world leery of reductionism?: “Hannah Arendt predicted that, post-Auschwitz, the problem of evil would be a primary focus of contemporary life. And it might have been, except for the fact that, in a destabilized and reflexively ironic age, we are always checking to make sure we haven’t overlooked a mitigating circumstance or an admirable principle gone wrong. Fearful as some of us are about exhibiting a too-primitive and “demonizing” attitude — the kind of macho Us-versus-Them, Axis-of-Evil line of thinking that has made Bush and Company figures of easy derision — we have become increasingly tentative about assigning this stark designation. (In “The Myth of Evil,” Phillip Cole says that his book “asks the question whether evil exists at all and one possible answer I take very seriously is that it does not.”) Few of us would be hesitant to use the word to describe the genocidal regimes, for example, of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Milosevic. But for the most part, we post-Manichaean postmodernists are more like Neville Chamberlain hoping to win over Hitler with a bit of coaxing than like Winston Churchill, who committed his country to fighting him. Given our a tradition of broad civil tolerance, it makes uneasy sense that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the half-buffoonish, half-demonic leader of Iran, was invited to speak at an ivy-towered bastion of learning, where he gave voice to his hate-mongering views.” (New York Times Magazine)

“Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior.” (New York Times Magazine)

“Can my jaded 7-year-old be scared, or at least have his pulse set racing, by a little old-fashioned smoke-and-mirrors, black-and-white moviemaking?” (New York Times)