In his celebrated earlier book, "A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988", the old categories of left and right still applied.
On Sunday, in a nearly three-hour news conference, Mr. Monti tried to use a new political language, going beyond the old categories of right and left.
Yet a rising generation of television writers — not pallid public schools — now works to nurture a cross-cultural agility in our kids, blurring the old categories of race and gender, even dispelling the notion of a mainstream culture.
This, surely, is the "hyperreality" defined by Jean Baudrillard: a feedback loop of constantly updated imagery that now has a value – as objective knowledge – that transcends the old categories of "reality" and "appearance".
I was reporting in Iraq during those years for The New Yorker and had seen the cruelty of sectarian extremists there, which was unfathomable to people who organized the world into old categories of left and right.
By doing little more than stopping to look closely and well at the anonymous people who pass us every day, Mr. Sternfeld has provided an eerie group portrait of our contemporary democracy, where, despite the many new and old categories of difference, we are all equally strangers to ourselves.
The old categories of "neocolonialism" miss the point.
Basically, he's the guy at a16z putting money into all sorts of startups that doesn't fall into the same boring old categories of consumer, mobile or enterprise technology.
