Here's the Economist, this week:

A brave man would see catharsis in all this misery; a wise man would not be so hasty.

Susan Jacoby, in her latest book, The Age of American Unreason, wrote:

The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between. This illusion of course is not confined to America, but its effects are especially deleterious in a culture (unlike, say, that of France or Japan) with an endemic predilection for technological answers to nontechnological questions ...

This condition is aggressively promoted by everyone, from politicians to media executives, whose livelihood depends on a public that derives its opinions from sound bites and blogs, and it is passively accepted by a public in thrall to the serpent promising effortless enjoyment from the fruit of the tree of infotainment.

Here's the Economist, again, from back in January:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

One from Adbusters:

We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

Finally, from Gertrude Himmelfarb:

To Carlyle, these legislative reforms were evidence of the incorrigibly utilitarian character of the age, mechanical attempts to cope with spiritual problems. In fact, they were brought about by the combined efforts of Evangelicals and utilitarians -- and Evangelicals perhaps more than utilitarians. The philosophy of the two could not have been more discordant. Where Evangelicalism derived its ethical and social imperatives from religion and morality (a religiously suffused morality), utilitarianism was a purely secular and pragmatic philosophy; the calculus of pleasure and pain that determined the individual's self-interest was presumed also to determine the public interest, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Yet this odd couple, Evangelicalism and utilitarianism, so far from operating at cross purposes, managed to cooperate in pursuit of the same social ends.