A great failure

• Wise words from New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright on the fallout from 9/11:

I feel like it's been a great failure of our artists and writers that we haven't done a better job at looking at ourselves and how we are and how our own behavior, to some extent, contributed to this tragedy...

America has lost so much standing in the world and we're going to have to do a lot to recapture it, but it begins with self-examination and I don't think that we have gone through that.

Granted, Wright's on the dog-and-pony-show circuit to plug his new book The Looming Tower, but still...