Please Don't Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries

Though they may read like opinion or satire, these sparkling essays are first and foremost, journalism: they inform. Michael Kinsley commands more facts than Al Franken's whiz-kid team of Harvard student researchers, wields a sharper rhetorical scalpel than either Lewis Lapham or Christopher Hitchens, and affects a gentler, warmer tone than even Garrison Keillor right as that scalpel goes in. Kinsley's magazine "The New Republic" lost me when it took that screeching right turn in the 90's; his appearances on NPR, with their magisterial equanimity, can come off as bland or even mealy-mouthed; but this collection is his triumph: the product of a broad, sober, splendid intellect confronting our absurd, horrid politics without once losing touch with reality.