The gang at the emergency room were a cheerful bunch. They bustled purposefully about, hooking me up to monitors and making polite but probing enquiries into deep recesses of my personal history and jamming me with needles into which they dribbled some actually quite pleasant drug. It wasn't how I'd planned to spend the evening but really it wasn't so bad.

My son Tristan, due home Saturday on spring break, has been struggling for days critiquing a book called The Improving State of the World. The book's premise — that things are actually getting better — drives him nearly apoplectic. (Can a nineteen-year-old become apoplectic? One prays not.)

Will Neils, the enfant terrible of Maine politics, tells a story about one of his numerous encounters with the law.