For as long as New York City health officials have graded restaurants, it has been a pass-fail sort of thing.
In the immediate aftermath, I felt like I had failed some sort of societal test.
The Hotel Hilton in particular would fail any sort of beauty contest – although there are plans afoot to turn this disgrace into something new.
The parade of bankers called to account for the financial crisis continued last week when Kerry K. Killinger, head of Washington Mutual, the largest bank ever to fail, apologized, sort of, as have many before him.
Failing this sort of response, Congress might enact the Student Loan Forgiveness Act, endorsed so eloquently by Maria Mayo in these pages on June 6.
"An undergraduate would be failed for this sort of thing," said Campbell, a reader in the anthropology of Africa and law at the University of London, who has been a country expert on asylum claims from Eritrea and Ethiopia since the mid-1990s.
Even more unsettling was finishing that first dinner with what at first appeared to be a failed cheesecake, the sort of thing I might make at home but would never expect be served in a restaurant.
Hand-picked to lead Channel 4 by Stephen Carter, when he was running Ofcom back in early 2004, because he was an entrepreneur with no special knowledge of broadcasting, Johnson will be making probably a final appearance having failed to sort out anything of significance – even a clean and humane parting of the ways with Andy Duncan.
On Sunday, though, the Giants struggled in any aspect of the game that is based on physical strength: they failed to get any sort of consistent pass rush, they failed to block and run the ball effectively, and they failed to pass-block, leaving Eli Manning open for contact on play after play.
"I saw so many other people fail, and was sort of like, 'Why bother?' " he said.
