After several years of frantic development, the dream of an "ideal" library remains elusive.
There's only so much these high priests and priestesses can do, and when both the science and the tools are still under frantic development, progress tends to be patchy and punctuated rather than pervasive.
What is truly tragic, and "the stuff of Greek drama," is that this farce has built up, over its nine years of frantic development, at a time when America itself is in a fall: Fully two-thirds of the American public tell pollsters they believe America is in decline.
The frantic pace of developments indicates that the industry is fast reaching a critical mass in its embrace of technology that could reshape the market, although skeptics still argue that electronic books are at least two years away from gaining widespread popularity.
Holt's depiction of his protagonist's development from frantic rookie to thinking practitioner is skillful, and the tales also work on their own as small, Joycean epiphanies.
The city of Sochi, on the edge of the Black Sea, embodies a range of familiar Olympic problems: concerns about the host city's political climate and human-rights record; threats of boycotts; geographic flaws that present maddening logistical concerns; frantic and expensive local development that is intended to serve specific, idiosyncratic, short-term needs at the expense of long-term planning.
Rock's once-frantic pace of development has long since slowed, partly thanks to the second-hand nostalgia that Bangs predicted: it's now an old and self-referential form, seemingly fated to repeat itself.
The pace of development is often frantic, nowhere more so than in China.
The second episode, however, is a more frantic affair, where world-building and character development are almost in competition with each other.
