Commentaries by João Carlos Souto

To date, America’s greatest contribution to the world has been its Constitution. The importance of this document far surpasses such other cultural achievements as the Moon landing, the telephone, GPS, rubber vulcanization, and Henry Ford’s mass production lines. It is more important, even, than Gone With the Wind, and the hamburger — even though this [...]

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In the 1930s, Europe watched through a haze of perplexity and inertia as Germany built a military structure practically unrivaled in human history. France and England, although threatened by the German war machine, chose the path of passivity and the belief that the worst could be avoided through diplomacy — even as the signs indicated [...]

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(c) Wikimedia (Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)

One score and 7 years ago, a man from Arkansas, brought forth on SCOTUS, a new kind of Associate Justice, inspired by Opera, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal. Now we are engaged in a kind of Political Civil War, testing whether this nation or [...]

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Albert Camus, 20th-century French writer, published in 1956, the book “La Chute” (The Fall), achieving public success and criticism. A year later, in 1957, Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature, for his work as a whole. La Chute is a monologue in which the character Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a lawyer, discusses his life and values, criticizing himself [...]

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