The night was growing colder, and there was a small sharp wind stirring from the east. But hot or cold, it was all one to him, who was already cold as death.

Kevin Smith wrote and directed the slacker hits “Clerks,” “Dogma” and “Chasing Amy,” but lately it is his other life—maintaining six Web sites that he describes as “devoted to my fans and my films”—that seems to consume him.

Deliberative democracy accepts the provisionality of its principles but rejects the provisionality of moral reasoning itself as a way of assessing politics.

Every reader has a right to know his authour’s motives for publishing at all, to be brought acquainted with his means of performance and his eligibility for the task; and the latter having likewise his rights to assert, this mutuality begets the undisputed custom of preface—the more gumptious the better.