Backblogged: Our Five Favorite Sentences of the Week: The New Yorker The President was right in his assertion Wednesday afternoon that Martin Luther King, Jr., had not died in vain, but neither did he die to be merely commemorated. From "Requiem for a Dream," by Jelani Cobb. No civilization we think worth studying, or whose relics we think worth visiting, existed without what amounts to an English department - texts that mattered, people who argued about them as if they mattered, and a sense of shame among the wealthy if they couldn't talk about them, at least a little, too. From "Why Teach English?" by Adam Gopnik.