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“For it is only the love of honor that never grows old,” Pericles said after the first battles of the Peloponnesian War, “and honor it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.”

the people and the president of Ukraine have shown that love of honor never grows old, even to a world that is sometimes indifferent, weary, and cynica

“Today you, Ukrainians, are a symbol of invincibility,” Zelensky told his people today. “A symbol that people in any country can become the best people on Earth at any moment.”

God bless them.

Fredrick Douglass drew on both strands of this debate, arguing in 1850 that “Liberty and Slavery” were both in the Constitution, giving us a constitution fundamentally “at war with itself.”

the First Inaugural where Lincoln argued that the states did not have a constitutional right to secede, particularly on the grounds that they did not like the results of the election of 1860. The states might have a revolutionary right to dissolve the constitutional order and create a new one, but to secede because Lincoln was elected president when he had in no way altered the terms of the social contract was to evade the rules and break the constitutional order he was obligated to defend.

I think Lincoln’s First Inaugural is a powerful and compelling work of constitutional analysis. Lincoln’s message in the First Inaugural was twofold. First, he reiterated the compromise. Each state had a right to “control its own domestic institutions” (meaning, of course, slavery). All representatives had sworn an oath to support “the whole Constitution,” which obligated them to adhere to the fugitive slave clause as part of the compromise and not try to evade its terms by “hypercritical rules” of interpretation

But Lincoln went on to insist that no part of the Constitution had been violated. Given this, he argued that secession against a constitutional majority would be “the essence of anarchy.” If states could secede after an election rather than “acquiesce” to a free and fair election, then democratic government by a constitutional majority was no longer possible.

Once ballots had settled the issue, states were constitutionally bound to oblige. Appealing to bullets was, as Lincoln put it, a “revolutionary” act that broke the constitutional order he had sworn an oath to uphold.

Feldman points out that Lincoln’s insistence on a majority as the sovereign was quite different from the Framers’ understanding of the sovereign, which they tended to treat as the whole people.

We might best understand this as a question of who is sovereign within the constitutional order, which is separate from who can act to dissolve the constitutional order itself

The most visible element of this debate was whether individual states were sovereign in the latter capacity: Could they exit the constitutional order? And if they could not constitutionally leave, did the national government have power to keep them in?

Whether America was a union founded by We the People or was a union founded by sovereign states was the subject of fraught debate in the antebellum period.

the prolonged struggle forced Lincoln to confront the fact that the Union could not be brought back together on the terms of the old compromise.

Feldman also highlights Lincoln as a theorist of constitutional necessity, as he is forced to confront thorny constitutional issues with no easy answer, which includes a detailed examination of Lincoln’s occasional overreach. Not only was his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus wider than necessary, but it included, Feldman writes, suspending “the basic constitutional right to free speech” and locking up critics of the war far more extensively than is usually acknowledged

Emancipation would be made permanent with the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery and destroying the compromise at the heart of the original Constitution: “The greater drama of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was its transformation of the prewar, compromise Constitution into a new Constitution that repudiated the very core of that compromise as it had existed from 1787 to 1861.” This second founding culminated in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, inscribing the principles articulated in the Declaration and reaffirmed by the Gettysburg Address into constitutional text.

Americans—particularly those Americans who think patriotism depends on a belief in an infallible founding and a perfect Constitution—too easily gloss over how “complicated, contradictory, and fraught it was for Lincoln and the nation to overcome [the old] Constitution and remake it.”

For him, the books were occasions; he picked up the bits that interested him and ran with them. (“It’s a book review, not a bouillon cube,” as Nicholson Baker put it, replying to Ken Auletta, who had complained about one of Baker’s similarly rangy reviews in the Book Review.)

Spying Henry Kissinger in the Sistine Chapel gawping at the Hell section of “The Last Judgment,” Vidal commented: “Look, he’s apartment hunting.”

Hitchens was sui generis. He made most other book reviewers, to borrow Dorothy Parker’s words about the drama critic George Jean Nathan, “look as if they spelled out their reviews with alphabet blocks.”

I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.

each component of it was about the same quality: humility.

The grammar-and-spelling bit was about surrendering to an established and easily understood way of doing things that eschewed wild individualism in favor of a common mode of communication. It showed respect for tradition, which is a force that binds us, a folding of the self into a greater whole

The voices bit — well, that’s obvious. It’s a reminder that we share the stages of our communities, our countries, our worlds, with many other actors and should conduct ourselves in a manner that recognizes this fact. A

I’d also been delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that humility is the antidote to grievance.

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire

This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel

They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.

They elevated how they viewed the world and what they wanted over tradition, institutional stability, law, order.

The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were delusional, frenzied, savage. But above all, they were unhumble. They decided that they held the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary.

anti-Trumps will be our salvation, and I say that not along partisan or ideological lines. I’m talking about character and how a society holds itself together.

It does that with concern for the common good, with respect for the institutions and procedures that protect that and with political leaders who ideally embody those traits or at least promote them.

He was fond of quoting Philippians 2:3, which he invoked as a lodestar for his administration. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” it says. “Rather, in humility value others above yourself.”

Governing, as opposed to demagoguery, is about earning others’ trust and cooperation. Exhibiting a willingness to listen to and to hear them goes a long way toward that.

“Insight and knowledge come from curiosity and humility,” Mr. Baker wrote in a 2022 book, “Results,” coauthored with his chief of staff, Steve Kadish, a Democrat. “Snap judgments — about people or ideas — are fueled by arrogance and conceit. They create blind spots and missed opportunities. Good ideas and interesting ways to accomplish goals in public life exist all over the place if you have the will, the curiosity, and the humility to find them.”

‘Yes, there’s demanding, but there’s also asking,’” he recalled. “And one is not the enemy of the other. People don’t like being accused, people don’t like being condemned, people don’t like being alienated. It’s a matter of conversation and persuasion.”

the message delivered by Loretta Ross, a longtime racial justice and human rights advocate, through her teaching, public speaking and writing. Troubled by the frequent targeting and pillorying of people on social media, she urged the practice of calling in rather than calling out those who’ve upset you. “Call-outs make people fearful of being targeted,” she wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture.” Instead, she advised, engage them. If you believe they need enlightenment, try that route, “without the self-indulgence of drama,” she wrote.

She was also recognizing other people’s right to disagree — to live differently, to talk differently. Pluralism is as much about that as it is about a multiracial, multifaith, multigender splendor.

Tolerance shares DNA with respect. It recognizes that other people have rights and inherent value even when we disagree vehemently with them.

we mustn’t treat every wound, every obstacle, as some cosmic outrage or mortal danger. We mustn’t lose sight of the struggle, imperfection and randomness of life. We mustn’t overstate our vulnerability and exaggerate our due.

While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.

Nevertheless, in more than two hours of extreme-weather depiction, the makers of “Twisters” opted to exclude even the tiniest nod to the chief driver of extreme weather.

In an interview with CNN’s Thomas Page, the movie’s director, Lee Isaac Chung, said, “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

It is not — and does not aspire to be — high cinematic art.

It is, however, a golden opportunity to talk about what scientists know and don’t know about how climate change might be affecting the formation, strength, frequency and geographic distribution of tornadoes, or why they now tend to develop in groups.

There’s a lot of talk in this movie about how tornadoes are getting bigger and more frequent, how they’re popping up in places, like New York City, that don’t historically experience the meteorological conditions that would spawn a tornado

There’s no talk at all about the science of global climate breakdown and what it will mean for people in the path of its destruction. That’s all of us.

if these filmmakers had allowed their characters — who include, after all, research scientists and climatologists — to muse aloud about how climate change might be affecting their work. In between lines like, “We’ve never seen tornadoes like this before,” would it have hurt to introduce, however briefly, the idea that something much bigger than a tornado threatens the planet those scientists are studying?

I’m guessing the decision to exclude even a passing reference to climate change in a film about weather disasters has very little to do with cinematic art, or even with climate science, and everything to do with avoiding the cross hairs of political polarity.

artifacts of popular culture have always had immense power to articulate changing attitudes, engage empathy and open firmly resistant minds. Think about how swiftly Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” changed attitudes toward the fragile natural world and led to new regulations of synthetic pesticides

how Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and John Prine’s “Paradise” expanded awareness of the environmental movement.

the CBS drama “Madam Secretary” proved that even a single episode with a climate-based story line could significantly affect viewers’ understanding of the human costs of climate change.

his is why Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” When art changes opinions or opens hearts, it changes the world as profoundly as any legislation does.

With MAGA politicians at every level denying that climate change even exists, real climate legislation is now nearly impossible to pass. And with the Supreme Court determined to quash all executive-branch efforts to address the changing climate, too, we seem to be at the mercy of artists to save us.

In a missed opportunity the size of an F5 tornado’s debris field, we got no help from the makers of “Twisters.”