“Do not sit high up on the ladder of abstraction.” That's what I’ve
said often to young journalists in 2012. “Emphasize specific
detail.” And in reading yesterday an essay the great novelist
Walker Percy wrote in 1990, I remembered that ladder of abstraction
problems go deeper than writing. Percy wrote, “Darwin, Newton, and
Freud were theorists. They pursued truth more or less successfully
by theory—from which, however, they themselves were exempt. You
will look in vain in
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