From a story, “Facing History: Why We Love Camus,” by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker:

What Camus wanted wasn’t new: just liberty, equality, and fraternity. But he found a new way to say it. Tone was what mattered. He discovered a way of speaking on the page that was unlike either the violent rhetorical clichés of Communism or the ponderous abstractions of the Catholic right. He struck a tone not of Voltairean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft. Camus sounds serious, but he also sounds sad—he added the authority of sadness to the activity of political writing. He wrote with dignity, at a moment when restoring dignity to public language was necessary, and he slowed public language at a time when history was moving too fast. At the Liberation, he wrote:

From a November 13 story by Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, headlined “A Return of Old Washington In Defiance of a Raucous Era”:

WASHINGTON — After so much noise, a formal feeling fell upon the Capitol. The civil servants had entered the room.

In a sense, seriousness itself stood trial on Wednesday as William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, and George P. Kent, a top State Department official, strode into the velvet-draped hearing room just after 10 a.m. They wore stern stares and were seemingly oblivious to the discord that brought them there. . . .

In a Wall Street Journal story about the firing of Canadian hockey legend Don Cherry from his broadcasting job, Peter Mansbridge, the dean of Canadian newscasters, was described as “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.”

A good line—I wondered if it had been used before. Like many good lines, the answer is yes.

George Will in 2011: “Elizabeth Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts.”

Jon Franklin, the Baltimore Sun journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting, on Facebook:

“I’ve been searching for decades for an opportunity to use the old medical caution about zebras. Young doctors are warned, ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.’ It means that your mind will trick you, and fill your head with exotica, like in the textbooks you’re reading. Your patient might make you think of Tibetan ivostabible neural atrophy, but what ails her is a common cold. You gotta know when to think zebras and when to think horses.

“Good advice for journalists, too.

From a Wall Street Journal column, “What We Can Learn From Oscar the Grouch,” by Colin Fleming, author of the book Buried on the Beaches: Cape Stories for Hooked Hearts and Driftwood Souls.

A creature emerged from a trash can 50 years ago, on Nov. 10, 1969. The creators of “Sesame Street” blessed Oscar the Grouch with a searching spirit. His can is a kingdom of wonders. . . .

Oscar charms audiences with irrepressible bonhomie. True, he’s not the sort to suffer a fool, he’s not desperate to make a friend, but if you’re also of a questing spirit, he’ll take you to his grouchy bosom. Oscar’s a real friend. For life. Not one for social-media back-scratching. . . .

As a followup to the post about how serving in the military can develop a bullshit detector—something ever more needed in journalism— another way to get smart about the world comes from the late, great Marquette basketball coach Al McGuire:

“I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.”

With so much name-calling these days, this short excerpt seems timely: It’s from the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk: