[…] wasn’t it gradual enough? I mean, the wrinkles coming, the gray choking out the black, the skin slackening and sinews getting stringy?

Bomb threats and pickets disrupted an all-night teach-in tonight at Michigan State University.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iran are both fought in defense of the manliness of America. […] President [George W.] Bush is reelected on a platform of never changing his mind, never reconsidering a decision once taken, and never worrying about what others might think or feel in relation to U.S. actions globally. Since this model of national sovereignty in the face of a foreign threat leaves little room for worrying about individual lives at home, victims of national disasters are subjected to an unimaginably callous carelessness. And the events in nature that shock and awe the senses are used as excuses for doing away with those minimal environmental protections that still constrain the fossil fuel industry.

The novitiate of Dickens is seen in the Sketches by Boz, and in many a casual piece; his increasing power in American Notes and in Pictures from Italy, and the fulness of his skill in The Uncommercial Traveller, where he is visibly a seasoned writer and surehanded, with all his virtues and faults in their permanent array.