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Grocers have long contended with store theft. But over the past few years they’ve seen an unsettling rise in a new kind of retail crime — one that is often carried out by groups of individuals who are able to get around traditional store security measures.

A more difficult but perhaps more honest emotional response to injustice is not gratitude to those who tolerate it but outrage. How much of what expresses itself in thank yous, marmalade sandwiches and clapping on doorsteps is really an avoidance of the fact that both in public and in private, as David Graeber put it, we have failed to take care of those who take care of us?

Firebrand statements have been part of the pulpit, and part of politics, for as long as we’ve been a nation. And there is a long history of both sides exaggerating

However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and Fox News had them every single night.”

The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.

Brown told me his alarm had only grown. “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment”—one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth—“is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.”

The moral quality of your actions is determined by how they correspond to the will of the authorities, rather than to your own principles or the rule of law. I’m convinced that we can’t blame Vladimir Putin alone. The vast majority of those who support his leadership are also guilty, as are those who do not oppose it. The question that bothers us mercilessly is: “Who’s to blame?”

“Evangelical militancy is often depicted as a response to fear,” she told me. “But it’s important to recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance their own interests.”

What does he hate so much about race? It’s not just that it is a bogus concept, not just that it leaves behind it an endless trail of atrocities, but that, on a smaller scale, it tries to limit what a person can be, telling them that they are one thing or the other, rather than many things at once.

Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000, implemented in 1966, pulled hundreds of thousands of poor men into the war—40% of them African American. By the following year, Black soldiers made up 16.3% of those drafted and 23% of Vietnam combat troops, despite accounting for only roughly 11% of the civilian population.

Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000, implemented in 1966, pulled hundreds of thousands of poor men into the war—40% of them African American. By the following year, Black soldiers made up 16.3% of those drafted and 23% of Vietnam combat troops, despite accounting for only roughly 11% of the civilian population.

The problem I have with a lot of investigative journalism, is that they always say: “There should be more investigative journalism” and I think, “When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I’m shocked but I’m not surprised because I know that. I don’t want to read another article that tells me that”. What I want is an article that tells me why, when I’m told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. And no one has ever explained that to me.

They’re constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people’s behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. It’s benign in a way and it’s an alternative to the old kind of politics. But it locks us into a static world because it’s always looking to the past. It can never imagine something new. It can’t imagine a future that hasn’t already existed. And it’s led to a sense of atrophy and repetition.

The balloon prospect, as the author Jesse Taylor put it, spoke to “the Victorian fantasy of rising above the obscurity of urban experience.”

In one poll asking people why they considered themselves Anglican, the three top answers had nothing to do with God: the faith was deemed “integral to English culture”, “an ethical voice in society” and “part of our heritage”.