Fair and balanced

I really don't have any objection to David Brooks's column today, a book report (he called it that himself) on the philosopher Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007). Except to note that you can get a lot more out of the Wikipedia article, which is a lot longer, better informed about the philosophical and historical issues, and written with beautiful lucidity. (Typically, the article is under attack by the encyclopedia's army of fussbudgets, who claim that it's inadequately sourced. The author seems to have relied more on reading the book than reading about it—that's overuse of "references to primary sources". Democracy haters who still believe Wikipedia must be badly made, if they still exist, have no idea of the pedantry that pervades it.)

Amazon wants almost forty bucks to put the book on Kindle! I'll have to wait for the movie to come out.

Piety in the Renaissance home. Unsourced image from swinish University of Cambridge; Wikipedia would never allow this to go unidentified.

Update: Driftglass proposes what might be called an Autoshorter (i.e., when the author of the shortened text writes his or her own):

I’m vastly oversimplifying a rich, complex book

Heh-indeed.