What makes a loft authentic isn’t its layout or its history but its ability to give people a true home – a dwelling that reflects their personalities and aspirations, including their dreams of urbanity.
The children who are ‘our future’ will inherit a world created not just by parental devotion but by the sort of zealous, focused endeavors that can preclude good parenting.
Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.
The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.
Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. They rapidly spread economic discovery – the scarce and costly knowledge of what retail concepts and operational innovations actually work.
Surprise drives progress because innovation depends on the sort of knowledge no one can gather in a central place.
The growth of medical expenditures in the U.S. is not caused by administrative costs but by increases in the technical intensity of care over time – a.k.a. medical progress.
In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, skeptical voters demand full disclosure of everything from candidates’ finances to their medical records, and spin-savvy accounts of backstage machinations dominate political coverage.
The glamour of air travel – its aspirational meaning in the public imagination – disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace.
The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world.
On the Net, the bell curve reclaims its tails. The uncommon is as accessible as the common. The very fragmentation of the Internet allows us to find ourselves in other people – and to know that we are not alone.