The incredible pervasiveness of dim: Jürgen Habermas as restorative.

Gadflies, consciousness, moral compass ...

Meanwhile, in New Albany you're stonewalled for a year and a half just trying to learn how many Bicentennial books were sold.

A Lion in Winter: Jürgen Habermas remains an indispensable guide to the unfinished project of democratic consciousness and enlightenment, by Peter E. Gordon (The Nation)

... The pensive man with the snow-white hair was the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who for more than six decades has played the part of gadfly in modern Germany, just as Socrates did in ancient Athens. Even at his ripe age—he is now 87—Habermas’s passion remains undiminished. As a public intellectual, however, he may seem an unlikely hero. We live in an age when what some of us still fondly call “the public sphere” has grown thick with personalities who prefer the TED Talk to the printed word and the tweet to the rigors of rational argument. For Habermas, it’s clear that without the constant exercise of public deliberation, democracy will collapse, and this means that citizens must be ready to submit their arguments to the acid bath of rational criticism.