September 8, 2014 - 6:00pm
WASHINGTON -- Speaking on Aug. 29 -- at a fundraiser, of course -- Barack Obama applied to a platitude the varnish of smartphone sociology, producing this intellectual sunburst: "The truth of the matter is, is that the world has always been messy. In part, we're just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through." So, if 14th- century Europeans had had Facebook and Twitter, they would have noticed how reallydisagreeable the Hundred Years' War was.