In early June, I was on the lovely campus of Princeton University reading George F. Will’s excellent new book, The Conservative Sensibility. Will is a Princeton graduate. His book begins with a meditation on Princeton and the Battle of Princeton in the Revolutionary War, and it conceives of the great American political debate as a conversation between two prominent Princetonians: James Madison, class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, who was the president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910. That’s a concentrated dose of Princeton.

I was thinking about what I would write in my review, and as I was doing so, Will himself was just across the campus at the Princeton chapel giving the baccalaureate address. His subject was intelligent praise: “Intelligent praising is a talent. It is learned. Like all virtues, it is habitual. … It is the virtue of recognizing virtue, and saluting it. Today, however, we live in what Arthur Brooks calls a ‘culture of contempt.'”