Commentary The idea of a straw that broke the camel’s back is proverbial. Some sources trace the notion back to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for whom the burden is feathers and the beast a horse, but I suspect that the basic idea is much older. What is the basic idea?  That an accumulation of evils is bearable up to a certain point, beyond which even a tiny addition, innocuous by itself, brings disaster. The image of a camel, struggling under a heavy load but then collapsing when another piece of straw is added to its burden is vivid and speaks to our intuition about how the business of life often proceeds. Like the child in the back seat on a long car ride, I find myself repeatedly asking “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” A couple of days ago, we learned the truth of what had been rumored all along: …