Go here to see one representative exchange, just posted online, with a Mark Levin Facebook fan. I wrote her after she called me an idiot. She offered some civil criticism. We had an enjoyable back and forth, a productive debate, and by the end of the exchange, she was writing Mr. Levin a rather critical letter... and being insulted herself on his Facebook page for dissenting. I've included our unabridged correspondence except for her name (though I'm confident that any reader of our exchange will come away thinking she is a very reasonable person indeed).

I've heard some harsh assessments of talk radio listeners, and I don't mean to suggest that how they respond to me is what matters, but I do think the exchange I link above, and others like it, demonstrate that those who listen to the less defensible stuff on talk radio shows and conclude that the kind of people who listen to them cannot be engaged are wrong. I'd say half of the Mark Levin listeners I've contacted responded positively -- and remember, these aren't random fans, I've particularly selected the folks who responded favorably to a Levin attacks, often against me. (Most of the rest haven't responded, and a few have stood by their initial remarks, though a bit more politely.)

I've had a lot of positive exchanges like that in my life, dating back to my days covering the immigration debate, a subject rumored to be intractable, though I don't think that's right. I never cease to be amazed by how open even initially hostile people are to being engaged and even persuaded, so long as you reciprocate.

We are under constant scrutiny by bloggers, like Friedersdork, who run nothing, are responsible for nothing, and contribute nothing to the advancement of liberty. If you google his name, you will see what a menace he has become, who he likes, and who he dislikes. He is obsessed with me, this site, and will now try to make nice with some of the posters here.


Take a good look at his "work" if you care. I have no idea why he listens to my radio show, contacts people on this site, and generally spends his days looking for any post with my name on it. But I find him truly pathetic. He fits the definition of a stalker, and he is now contacting some of you folks directly. Just be careful. He's very strange.

There are three kinds of valid explanation for Federer's ascendancy. One kind involves mystery and metaphysics and is, I think, closest to the real truth. The others are more technical and make for better journalism.

The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could "float" across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. There are probably a half-dozen other examples since 1960. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

This thing about the ball cooperatively hanging there, slowing down, as if susceptible to the Swiss's will — there's real metaphysical truth here. And in the following anecdote. After a July 7 semifinal in which Federer destroyed Jonas Bjorkman — not just beat him, destroyed him — and just before a requisite post-match news conference in which Bjorkman, who's friendly with Federer, says he was pleased to "have the best seat in the house" to watch the Swiss "play the nearest to perfection you can play tennis," Federer and Bjorkman are chatting and joking around, and Bjorkman asks him just how unnaturally big the ball was looking to him out there, and Federer confirms that it was "like a bowling ball or basketball." He means it just as a bantery, modest way to make Bjorkman feel better, to confirm that he's surprised by how unusually well he played today; but he's also revealing something about what tennis is like for him. Imagine that you're a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you're playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won't experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you.

The nightmare is still on. The bodies are beneath the rubble, the last-minute cell-phone calls—remarkably calm and loving, many of them—are still being reported, the sound of an airplane overhead still bears an unfamiliar menace, the thought of boarding an airplane with our old blasé blitheness keeps receding into the past. Determined men who have transposed their own lives to a martyr's afterlife can still inflict an amount of destruction that defies belief. War is conducted with a fury that requires abstraction—that turns a planeful of peaceful passengers, children included, into a missile the faceless enemy deserves. The other side has the abstractions; we have only the mundane duties of survivors—to pick up the pieces, to bury the dead, to take more precautions, to go on living.

American freedom of motion, one of our prides, has taken a hit. Can we afford the openness that lets future kamikaze pilots, say, enroll in Florida flying schools? A Florida neighbor of one of the suspects remembers him saying he didn't like the United States: "He said it was too lax. He said, 'I can go anywhere I want to, and they can't stop me.' " It is a weird complaint, a begging perhaps to be stopped. Weird, too, the silence of the heavens these days, as flying has ceased across America. But fly again we must; risk is a price of freedom, and walking around Brooklyn Heights that afternoon, as ash drifted in the air and cars were few and open-air lunches continued as usual on Montague Street, renewed the impression that, with all its failings, this is a country worth fighting for. Freedom, reflected in the street's diversity and daily ease, felt palpable. It is mankind's elixir, even if a few turn it to poison.

The next morning, I went back to the open vantage from which we had watched the tower so dreadfully slip from sight. The fresh sun shone on the eastward façades, a few boats tentatively moved in the river, the ruins were still sending out smoke, but New York looked glorious.

"Every column is a failure," says Brooks. "I always wish I did something different." Part of the problem is the format. There's only so much you can do with 800 words. "I'm a 3,000-word person," he says.

Deadline days end with fourteen piles of paper stacked around his office—printouts, notes, index cards, photocopies—one for each paragraph of the story. If the column doesn't come together, he resorts to the laundry list, beginning each paragraph with "First," "Second," etc. "Usually when I do that, I've written another version of the column and it sucked," he says, "so those are usually acts of sheer desperation."

Plus Brooks just isn't that opinionated. "I look at Andrew Sullivan or Jonathan Chait, churning out opinions," he says. "I don't have that many." Brooks's goal isn't to change minds, he says. "Do I expect someone with View X on a policy, and I argue View Anti-X, that somehow they're gonna totally change their mind? I don't think I've ever had that effect on anybody." He can "strengthen and highlight certain feelings," he says. But that's about it.