Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

Having a persistent nature is part of being human. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to speak of knowing another person, or loving them, or being their friend or enemy or rival.

I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption.

But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation.

It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.