I haven't wanted to use this blog to comment directly on current events - I rarely feel that I have anything to add to the "discourse" that someone with more insight and a larger platform hasn't already said, and I simply don't have the time and energy to try to keep up with everything that is going on. But it is often impossible to think of anything else; and one contribution that I feel I can legitimately make is to offer an account, at least occasionally, of what it "feels like" to be living through this period - from a certain point of view, of course, but a point of view that is held enough in common with my milieu (liberal, educated, PMC) that I feel there might be something gained in articulating it for others. What follows is a handful of thoughts and impressions I wrote down toward the end of January, in an attempt to express the distress I felt at the news coming out of Minneapolis. These are fragmentary and inadequate; I thought about compilin...