I'm hardly naive about the willingness of politicians to twist the English language to suit their ends, so that tax hikes become "revenue enhancement" and cutting Medicare turns into "preserve, protect, and improve." But the thoroughly relativistic approach to truth employed by Frank Luntz never fails to take my breath away.

French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss died over the weekend at the age of 100.  His theory of structuralism was a major influence on such titans of philosophy as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Back in 1967, TNR's Patrick Gallagher reviewed his seminal work The Savage Mind, which sought to transform the way Western civilization looks at the native populations. Click here to give it a read.