Anthony Trollope once described his great novel The Way We Live Now (1875) as “an attack on the commercial profligacy of the age.” Trollope went on to criticize his novel for exaggerating the social and moral evils it portrays. Such exaggeration, he said in his Autobiography (1883), is a “fault which is to be attributed to almost all satires.” We wonder what Trollope would say were he with us today. Would he still think it an “exaggeration”? We suspect that almost all of our readers could provide a long list of examples, drawn from the way we live now, that would make the perfidy Trollope chronicled pale in comparison.

We are not thinking of anything dramatic or out of the ordinary. On the contrary, what we have in mind are the myriad little degradations and invitations to moral and aesthetic coarsening with which contemporary life surrounds us. An item that appeared on ...

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