The creative approach to language, the expressive urge, the impact of a whim to let […]

The Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear), hosted by superstar comic news anchors Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert on the National Mall in Washington, DC, has drawn hundreds of thousands of people from across the country. Turnout was estimated at 300,000 beforehand, but images from the Mall show an edge-to-edge crowd filling the lawn from the stage at least as far back as the Washington Monument, meaning the total could well exceed 500,000 people.

Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska, writes: “Every variation of public service, including elective office, should be anchored by one complete and overriding truth and objective—to make a better world,” as part of a powerful statement urging civility and good-will from all who seek to involve themselves in the work of public service. Hagel’s open letter to the political world comes at a time when many election observers say the campaign of 2010 is the most degenerate and ill-intentioned in memory, where lies are prevailing over evidence and the ability to commit to effective and relentless distortion has become the most sought-after weapon of campaigners.

In a speech to a packed room at Villanova University, during the university’s three-day celebration of the legacy and work of St. Thomas of Villanova —a celebration that includes scholarly presentations, community gatherings, this keynote address and a day of service in which thousands fan out across the region to do charitable work—, E.J. Dionne called for a politics rooted in conscience and compassion for our fellow human beings. The acclaimed journalist, scholar and Washington Post columnist rooted his talk in Catholic Social Teaching and spoke of an historical drive, in the US, toward comprehensive social justice.

Today is the Day of the Book, in part spurred by the urge to recognize two of the great progenitors of modern literature, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who both died on 23 April 1616, at least according to the official history. Their work and the various arts that go into making books, as such, are celebrated around the world as staples of modern global civilization and the human element of culture. But the book is more than those sweeping historical energies; it is a concrete, observable register of intent and of meaning, which carries evidence of our humanity forward and informs and improves future worlds.

The Amazon Kindle DX is a beautiful device. Its design is user-friendly, intuitive and cohesive. It is clean-edged, minimal and thinner than many major magazines. Its format size is comfortable and makes tactile sense; it feels like something you hold in order to read, giving it a useful aesthetic kinship to books or magazines, a vast improvement on smaller e-reading devices. It is, in point of fact, far more comfortable than planting yourself in front of a computer monitor to read large amounts of text.

The Financial Times is the latest publication to weigh in on mounting expectations that Apple will release a touchscreen tablet computer this fall. There are rumors the computer maker is hoping to counter the rise of cheap netbooks with something lower-cost than their standard Macs and with a larger screen based on the model of the iPod Touch and the iPhone. The news could mean a breakthrough in personal computing standards and even portability of the workplace.

American journalism has lost one of its elder statesmen. Walter Cronkite was one of the founding fathers of broadcast journalism, pioneering a warm, conversational style for delivering facts with detachment and gravitas. The old-style newsman delivered news to the American viewing public about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the protests of the 1960s, the Moon landing (40 years ago Monday), Watergate and other major moments of crisis and achievement.

It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.