We wait, but we don’t pray. By that I mean we don’t wait for a sign from any god, prophet, or spirit. Not with two terrorists on the loose and a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Not with a BlackBerry perpetually blinking red, perpetually in hand like an extra appendage. To pray is the privilege and the penalty for living outside this bubble. In a house underwater, on a shell-lined street in Chicago, in Baghdad, Crimea, or Homs—there you pray. But at the White House, when the sirens go off, officials are tasked with finding improbable solutions to impossible problems. Around the world, television
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