Crooked Timber

America's suicide bombers don't use bombs and don't seem to have a cause larger than their own angst, but they're as lethal as any misguided political fanatic and they beg a question as urgent as any the human race has faced.

Yet it's the same old - indeed, Paleolithic - question we've always faced. Are we the hunter or are we the prey? Or are we something else, some preposterous and divine mixture of the two, holy terrors, flawed creators who keep failing to get it right? As Immanuel Kant put it: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made."