FRESH IDEAS: The beauty in the ordinary

From Claire Messud, at The New York Review of Books: "Daily, I slice bread with my maternal grandmother's bread knife. Neither beautiful nor valuable — its handle scored white melamine, its wide serrations still sharp — it connects me to my mother's hands (that used this knife) and to my grandmother's hands (smaller than my mother's, arthritic already when I was born); to my grandmother's kitchen, beloved in my childhood; and to the long-ago morning light that filtered through the sunroom into that kitchen, in a long-sold house, in a far-off city.

COMMENTARY FROM E.J. Dionne: Off into the jungle of political suspicion