In his intriguing new book "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America" (Harvard), Scott Sandage argues that the mid-19th century saw a redefinition of failure from something that described a lousy business to something that defined a whole life.Yet one of the striking things about America is how valiantly it has resisted the idea that there is any such thing as a born loser.
But while his debut, 1996's scuzzy, much-loved Swingers, was a film born from failure, Chef is a movie that could only have been made by someone plump on success.
Her first baby was born after failure to progress in the first stage of labour and her second was a planned caesarean: I was coughing so badly that I did have some slight leakage happening - for the first time ever - and just fractionally, a couple of times.
A lot of the energy animating Brexit, said Sandel, had been "born of this failure of elites".
The return of the "government war," as Mr. Brooks calls it, has nothing to do with any real growth of government, much less any real infringement of liberty -- it is a Republican strategy born of Republican failure.
Australia's initial foray into elite sporting programs, through the AIS, was born out of failure: the nation performed so poorly at the 1976 Olympics that it caused a political scandal.
The former England captain Nasser Hussein said he always found the very public berating of fielders who dropped catches or made a mistake "a little bit odd" but said that Pietersen's frustration was mainly born of cricketing failure.
As the movie suggests, this failure, born of American arrogance, embraces liberals as well as neocons, though the liberals, to their credit, do occasionally take responsibility for their mistakes.
Robert Kaplan, an American writer, captured and somewhat exaggerated an important truth by describing the chaos engulfing Liberia and Sierra Leone and warning of the "coming anarchy" in other parts of the world.When words become deedsNo sooner was the term "state failure" born than political scientists began picking it apart.
And that crisis was born of a failure of responsibility -- from Wall Street all the way to Washington -- that brought down many of the world's largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great Depression.
