An older Ukrainian guy walks his dogs in the woods near my house. We talk a lot. The other day I was complaining about tendonitis in my ankle, which was causing me pain. 

“Pain?” he said. “You call tendonitis ‘pain’?” 

“What would you call it?” I said.

“Better to say .  .  . ‘discomfort.’ ” 

Marilynne Robinson is afraid we are losing our “loyalty to democracy” in America, though her reasons for fearing this might (or might not) surprise you. Tribalism and austerity—a general lack of generosity—will kill America. Individuals are generous enough, she admits, but what is lacking is a generosity in our public discourse and public programs. This is the gist of her sometimes insightful, but too often frustratingly vague, collection of essays. 

Fifty years ago this coming All Saints’ Day, the United States government concluded its patronage of Ngo Dinh Diem by dispatching him from the presidency of South Vietnam. His removal, in a U.S.-countenanced Vietnamese military coup, might have been less dramatic had President Diem not perished, with his brother and svengali Ngo Dinh Nhu, at the hands of junior Vietnamese officers entrusted with their safe exfiltration.

The great thing about this account of the artists and intellectuals in and around New Orleans’s French Quarter during the 1920s is that it upends nearly every assumption commonly made about the American South—even the true ones. The early-20th-century South may have produced the odd isolated genius, but it did not generate anything of cultural distinction. True enough.

Peggy Noonan on why the IRS scandal is different.

They weren't just after the Tea Party.

State: Iran's back to sponsoring terrorism again.

What Lee Rigby's murder says about Western society.

The question of the Virginia governor's race may be who is least unlikable.

"It's just amazing how history repeats itself."

Clinton's scandals were way worse than Obama's.

You know who created tax "gimmicks" and "loopholes"? Congress!

David Freddoso: Boehner is a weak speaker, and that's good thing.

The varying tax rates of the S&P 500 companies.

Roger Kaplan on those heroes will we remember.

"Independent" Michael Bloomberg could lose the Democrats' Senate majority.

In his introduction to this new collection of essays by Janet Malcolm, Ian Frazier writes generously, if generically, that the book “brings together a wide range of pieces that display her unique skills.” By the time we have finished reading Forty-one False Starts, however, Frazier’s praise rings hollow.

Not once, not twice, but three times in the course of the 86-minute running time of the extravagantly praised Frances Ha is the title character shown running through Manhattan. Once, we see her running with her best friend. Another time we see her running to find an ATM. Then we see her running while improvising dance moves. 

When John Henry Newman died in 1890, English papers around the world singled out different aspects of his life and work for praise or censure, but on one point they were unanimous. As the obituarist of the Colonies and India put it, “We question whether there is a living writer who had a command of the English tongue at once so eloquent and incisive, though often ironical.” The force of Newman’s style may have been universally acknowledged, but the content of the writing was rarely paid the attention it deserves.