The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.

Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn’t give us a completely clear picture.

Progress through trial and error depends not only on making trials, but on recognizing errors.

Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.

At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.

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.

Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want.