The distinction between the practical and the theoretical is used to warehouse society into groups. It alienates and divides. It is fortunate, then, that it is nothing more than a fiction.

-- Jason Stanley

At the same time, the slide show's vision of the individual's relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of "the Life of Julia" doesn't envision government spending the way an older liberalism did -- as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness. It offers a more sweeping vision of government's place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision -- personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual -- can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

-- Ross Douthat

"Most people in the financial world," a top Obama donor later told me, "do not understand how most of America feels about them." But they think they understand how the president's inner circle feels about them. "This administration has a more contemptuous view of big money and of Wall Street than any administration in 40 years," the donor said. "And it shows."

"I knew a guy, and I couldn't actually believe he was saying this, but he said, 'Why would I want to eat in the same restaurant every night when the world's a buffet?' I thought people said that only on 'Entourage'."

Dunham is one of the four main players in "Girls." She's joined by Allison Williams (the daughter of the NBC anchorman Brian), Zosia Mamet (the daughter of the playwright David) and Jemima Kirke (the daughter of the Bad Company drummer Simon). All four sat down with The Times's Dave Itzkoff recently for a spirited group chat.

Dunham has an extended sex scene in each of the first two episodes of "Girls," and I told her I couldn't quite tell whether her character, who professes enjoyment of these encounters, is really supposed to have enjoyed them. The ambiguity struck me as intentional.

-- Bruni, Bruni, and Itzkoff.

You have to recognize there will be a moment in time when you will not be able to be represented by the quality of your work but rather by the relationships you have. If you're in a crisis, what matters is what you're made of and what you believe and how well you can express that. What I say to people is to get ready for those moments by practicing every chance you get to take the lead, to step out in front of the work. Don't hide behind it.

When those moments come along and you need to draw on resources that are internal and your personal belief system, if you don't know what they are, others will tell you what they are. People can then come to you and say, "Well, you just don't know how to lead from the front," a critique I've never understood.

Self-knowledge is so obvious-sounding that I hate to use it like that, but in fact you can be masterful at doing the work and you can be good in team relationships, but one day you will be called on to have difficult, complex relationships and a different part of you has to be used for that.

-- Charlotte Beers

-- Margaret Atwood

Not just any "less" is the right "more." A minimal design must be progressively reduced and refined to its essential and sometimes surprising causes and effects, just as a divinely immanent David was discovered by Michelangelo inside an unpromising block of stone. All else is decoration, deception and distraction. Thus because some cuts are figuratively as well as literally incisive, any cut can seem wise: austere art is smart art. It's an architecture of revealed order and selective filtering and pattern recognition.

The aesthetic austerity that results requires and rewards our inclination to look and think: wander long enough around Mies's glassy Farnsworth House of 1950, and you see crystallized in every simple and delicately floating surface the bones of every good house ever made -- a severe and serene dream of comfort and clarity, refuge and prospect. At least in theory.

Opinion
Why Less Isn't Always More
By THOMAS DE MONCHAUX
Published: February 25, 2012
The word austerity rolls trippingly off the tongue and connotes ethical propriety and pleasing aesthetics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/why-less-isnt-always-more.html?pagewanted=all

Ori J. Herstein, who studied philosophy in grad school and is a doctor in the science of law, says that "an economics Ph.D. is the most valuable," and that "the further away you get from the humanities the better."

Mr. Herstein was sitting in the Marriott lobby between interviews. Israeli-born and cheerful in a boyishly wonky way, he has a résumé that seems custom-built to tantalize law school recruiters. He has two degrees from Columbia, which, along with a handful of other elite schools -- most notably Yale -- has become a farm team for the credential-obsessed legal academy. He has already published a handful of law review articles with promisingly esoteric titles ("Historic Injustice and the Non-Identity Problem: The Limitations of the Subsequent-Wrong Solution and Towards a New Solution") and has submitted another that sounds perfectly inscrutable ("Why Nonexistent People Do Not Have Zero Well-Being but Rather No Well-Being").

The photographer's power lies not only in determining how his or her subject poses, but also in how the image is ultimately produced (cropping, editing, Photoshopping, etc.); as Sontag put it, "in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects." Small wonder that Julia Roberts could tell American Photo in 2004 that she feels "stupid," "goofy," and "nervous"--like Depp--when being photographed and, in the same breath, say that when she handles a camera (as in the film Closer, in which she played a professional photographer), it "instantly makes you the coolest person in the room."

Johhny Depp

Johnny Depp took his reputation for eccentricity a little too far last week. Interviewed in the November issue of Vanity Fair, the actor appeared to let his guard down when discussing photo shoots with writer Nick Tosches, a long-time friend and a godparent to one of Depp's kids. "Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow," the actor said. "Raped. The whole thing. It feels like a kind of weird--just weird, man. Weird. Like you meet people and they say, 'Can I have a picture with you!' And that's great. That's fine. That's not a problem. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like--you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid."

The answer is clearly not provided on the big screen. On the contrary. Interestingly, Depp uses the term "stupid" at least a couple other times in the interview. One of them comes when he's describing his opposition to a staged cockfight in the upcoming film, The Rum Diary. Though the cockfighting scene reportedly looks real, the roosters were protected from killing each other with pieces of invisible monofilament (in accordance with American Humane Association regulations), a precaution he appeared to think detracted from the viscerality of Hunter S. Thompson's original scene. "I think it was stupid," he told Tosches. Extrapolating from that comment, Depp use of the term "stupid" suggests his aversion to false representation. Given his stated pleasure at being photographed by fans in his everyday life, it's the falseness of the photo shoot and the poses associated with it that seem to bother Depp.

Kristen Stewart:

Explaining her moodiness around paparazzi, Stewart contended that the public is not often privy to what happens before the pictures are taken. "What you don't see are the cameras shoved in my face and the bizarre intrusive questions being asked, or the people falling over themselves, screaming and taunting to get a reaction," she told Elle. "All you see is an actor or a celebrity lit up by a flash. It's so... The photos are so... I feel like I'm looking at someone being raped."

In the same interview, Stewart did, however, seem to be in tune with Sontag. "Your little persona is made up of all the places that people have seen you and what has been said about you, and usually the places that I am are so overwhelming in the moment and fleeting for me--like one second where I've said something stupid, that's me, forever."

-- Soraya Roberts

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock -- to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

The fact is, he's good at dismantling. He's good at critiquing. He's good at not being the last guy, the one you didn't like. But he's not good at building, creating, calling into being. He was good at summoning hope, but he's not good at directing it and turning it into something concrete that answers a broad public desire.

And so his failures in the debt ceiling fight. He wasn't serious, he was only shrewd--and shrewdness wasn't enough. He demagogued the issue--no Social Security checks--until he was called out, and then went on the hustings spouting inanities. He left conservatives scratching their heads: They could have made a better, more moving case for the liberal ideal as translated into the modern moment, than he did. He never offered a plan. In a crisis he was merely sly. And no one likes sly, no one respects it.

So he is losing a battle in which he had superior forces--the presidency, the U.S. Senate. In the process he revealed that his foes have given him too much mystique. He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.

-- Peggy Noonan

As for the Democrats, they offer practically nothing. They acknowledge huge problems like wage stagnation and then offer... light rail! Solar panels! It was telling that the Democrats offered no budget this year, even though they are supposedly running the country. That's because they too are trapped in a bygone era.

Mentally, they are living in the era of affluence, but, actually, they are living in the era of austerity. They still have these grand spending ideas, but there is no longer any money to pay for them and there won't be for decades. Democrats dream New Deal dreams, propose nothing and try to win elections by making sure nobody ever touches Medicare.