As we move from the civil solemnity of Carter’s funeral to the portentous pomp of Trump’s second inauguration, do we now find ourselves at such a historic turning — an inflection point, as policy wonks like to say — a hinge moment after which our reigning assumptions about the world that seem so solid will “melt into air,” to use the phrase of a noted manifesto-writing nineteenth-century German philosopher?   What is history’s clock saying about this moment?  If an epoch is ending, what will be the motto of the era that might lie ahead – a restored Great America, a new Time of Troubles, a Dark Enlightenment, or something entirely different? More

The final missions of Army Sergeants Mathew Livelsberger and Shamsud-Din Jabbar left millions of other Americans scratching their heads.  Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction? More