"Politics has its virtues, all too many of them — it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things — but..."

"... one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made."

Wrote Norman Mailer in "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (1960). I've quoted that before, but it's jumping out at me today as I'm looking at all my old posts about Mailer's 1968 book "Miami and the Siege of Chicago." The 1968 book — about the Republican convention (nominating Nixon in Miami) and the Democratic Convention (nominating Humphrey in Chicago, with rioting in the streets) — is something I read in 2016 to prime myself to write about that year's conventions, which were so much tamer than what happened in 1968.

I'm thinking of the book today because I'm reading a New Yorker article about it, "A Great Writer at the 1968 Democratic Disaster," by David Denby. The crazy 1968 Democratic Convention took place exactly 50 years ago this week (August 26th to 29th). Denby writes: