"Brains are back!"

After eight years of proud incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, we now have a leader who values nuance and careful thought.

What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemies and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back.

From Michael Hirsh in Newsweek.

As a writer (ok, ok, and a liberal), it's wonderfully refreshing that the nation's leader is an intellectual, a former professor, and a scholar of constitutional law. Sure, Laura Bush was a librarian and George Bush read Camus. But this, this is different.

As Toni Morrison and Jonathan Safran Foer look forward to this administration, so do I (see: Writers welcome a more literary president-elect in Barack Obama).