1) The last thing I wanted to do was read another article on Charlie Hebdo, freedom of speech, and the Islamofascist threat. It’s not that I don’t think those things are cataclysmically important. But you can only read so much. And then you are full, like a glass or pitcher.

But I highly recommend this editorial in the new New Criterion (an editorial with Roger Kimball stamped all over it). It is stirring, compelling, stylish, and true. And important. A feat, actually.

2) I know that Heather Mac Donald is not indispensable, strictly speaking. “The graveyard is full of indispensable men,” goes an old line. No one is indispensable. If someone were, we’d be in big trouble. Still, I can’t help feeling that Heather is almost indispensable. If she did not pen certain truths, and research certain questions, who would?

Never is she better than at the intersection of race, crime, and politics. She has a piece in the current National Review on the New York situation. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Russians used to write Solzhenitsyn saying, “Look after your health, Aleksandr Isayevich. We need you.” I feel like writing such a letter to Heather. Also to Thomas Sowell. After him, who?

3) Impromptus today begins with an item on a line you frequently hear: “Presidential candidates should be governors. You should have executive experience, and in particular the experience of being governor, before running for president.” I note in this column that you hear this line from the right; you never hear it from the left, or at least I don’t.

In my column, I don’t pause to say why this may be. I thought I’d offer a suggestion here. It could be that the Left has no great interest in competent administration. They are more interested in “fundamental transformation,” to coin a phrase: in a new man, a new woman, and a new society. The ayatollah Khomeini said he did not take over Iran to lower the price of watermelons.

Anyway, this is the subject of a big essay, and I’m inclined to leave it to someone else to write.