After the wave of treacly nostalgia over the death of TV icon Andy Griffith, whose genial governance over a lily-white town in 1960s America came to be viewed as “one of the last links to another, simpler time,” a hard-nosed, in-depth look at the myth of American exceptionalism and its much-ballyhooed decline. From Frank Rich, now at New York Magazine.

From Sorkin's The Newsroom.