Julie Westfall

Much discussion on Tuesday centered on the paradox of why the United States, a country that can kill terrorists with remote-controlled drones, would feel the need to send a man with a map and a compass to navigate the traffic-choked Russian capital.

For Berry and the others to be rescued, in other words, two things had to happen: she had to never forget who she was, and that who she was mattered; and Ramsey needed to not care who she might be at all—to think that all that mattered was that a woman was trapped behind a door that wouldn’t open, and to walk onto the porch.

With all our warts, we have built a unique society — a country where a black man, whose middle name is Hussein, whose grandfather was a Muslim, can run for president and first defeat a woman in his own party and then four years later a Mormon from the opposition, and no one thinks twice about it.

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

Life loves the liver of it.

Increasingly, the message in America is clear: If your organization or project is a myopic den of white homogeneity, or if your strategy for success includes trying to gin up fear around people who are different, you are destined for irrelevance, and nobody will care how rich you are, or who your daddy is, or at what ivy-draped liberal arts school you cut your perfect teeth. Those who haven’t learned that lesson are mocked, shunned, or, worse, totally ignored. Either way, they don’t win elections.

The partisanship that shapes our politics has many costs. Congress has trouble making decisions, tensions among voters over certain issues are often severe, and the quality of our discourse often suffers. Perhaps one of the worst effects of partisanship, however, has been the fact that the truth is much harder to discern and, in many cases, voters don’t even expect it.

Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.

There were times that the match seemed better suited not for a tennis court, but a therapist’s office, preferably with Murray reclined on a long leather couch, asking “Why?

[Andy] Roddick does seem to embody America in some essential way. The man has the stars and stripes splashed across his shoes. He committed himself to helping his country win the Davis Cup with the same intensity that he threw himself into winning slams. He lives in Texas. Given the chance, he dated a pop star and married a model. Roddick is a mess of contradictions that speak to a kind of enduring American stereotype: smart-ass, arrogant, and intemperate, but also straight-shooting, generous, and thoughtful. He wasn’t the best — but he lived up to that old American slogan that he did his best.

Gymnastics is a sport that makes glossy insta-celebrities out of broad-shouldered workhorses, as jarring a concept as putting glitter and fake eyelashes on the world’s most dogged athletes. Something about it feels absurd, though the part that makes heroes out of teenage girls feels absolutely essential.

Movie screen superheroes never die. But there were superheroes present in a darkened movie theater at the Town Center at Aurora mall, and some of them did die.

The useless days will add up to something.