Attention to the Unseen

Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes: She finished her speech in New Hampshire to great applause and asked for questions, but nobody wanted to know how “a politics of love,” as she called it, would handle, say, President Vladimir Putin’s annexing Crimea, or how it would prevent a mass shooting, which were things she had thought about deeply and had specific and elaborate plans for. They didn’t want to know about her Department of Children and Youth or her Department of Peace. No,…

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Richard Parker writes: If leadership could be rated from one to 10, Mr. Abbott’s would be a zero. The names of dead, wounded and shattered Texans on his watch, are etched across the state: Dallas, Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe, El Paso and now Odessa. He has never had the guts to do more than mouth a few platitudes while paying obeisance to the gun lobby and the state’s admittedly historic gun culture. In 2015, he even tweeted: “I’m EMBARRASSED: Texas…

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The New York Times reports: “How badly do you want to be president?” Joseph R. Biden Jr. was asked after a recent speech in Prole, Iowa. The answer to such an inquiry would appear self-evident in the case of Mr. Biden, who began his running-for-president routine more than three decades ago; in other words, very badly, one would assume. But the question, posed by a reporter, seemed to come at Mr. Biden as a bit of a curveball — a…

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Reuters reports: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is laying an election “elephant trap” for the opposition Labour Party that it should avoid, former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair warned on Monday. “Boris Johnson knows that if no-deal Brexit stands on its own as a proposition it might well fail but if he mixes it up with the Corbyn question in a general election he could succeed despite a majority being against a no-deal Brexit because some may fear a Corbyn…

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Megan K. Stack writes: Peter and his friends were on the move in the streets of Hong Kong. They cut through the sooty midday heat, jostling and joking in skateboarding sneakers, making their way past tattered industrial buildings, printing presses, and garages. They were three young men in a crowd of thousands of people, snaking through the streets and along the waterfront. They marched with the crowd and shouted slogans, but to Peter and his friends the demonstration was just…

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Polly Toynbee writes: An “outrage”, a “coup”, an “abomination”, a country tumbling into “failed state status”, Britain a “banana republic”, Boris Johnson a “dictator”. Parliamentarians stretch the limits of their vocabulary to express disbelief that this could happen in Britain, the “cradle of democracy”. Rewrite the history books, tear up Bagehot’s The English Constitution, as the Queen and privy council sign the prorogation, neither the “dignified parts” not the “efficient parts” function any longer. This country that self-identified so smugly…

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