Still, I couldn’t give up Sunday’s Times. One time shortly after the 2018 hurricane a friend saw me leaving the store with one tucked under my arm and stopped me. “Wait, the Times?” he said. “Are those the totalitarian assholes that tried to kill you?” They are. Seeing such communist propaganda so close to the arts sections brought to mind a line from the great film The Sweet Smell of Success—“I don’t like you, you’re like a cookie with arsenic.”

In the same Sunday Times from last week, David Brooks has a moving essay about the importance of art—how it touches us in a deeper place than politics. Going to a museum, a concert or reading a book to experience beauty transforms us in a way politics never can. “These experiences furnish us with a kind of emotional knowledge,” Brooks writes, “how to feel and express feelings, how to sympathize with someone who is grieving, how to share the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child grow.”

This is more important than politics. I’ve often said that the pulp movie 300 is more important than 1000 position papers from the Heritage Foundation.