Half a century ago, the notion that most Americans would soon be at least a generation removed from skilled manual labor would have seemed remarkable.
You might have forgiven its anodyne sound a few years back, when a mainstream US pop album packed full of Bush-baiting songs would have seemed remarkable and unique.
It's a transformation that would have seemed remarkable to anyone in the 1960s and 1970s, when a private sector that dwindled from 4.7m homes in 1961 to 3.2m in 1971 was rapidly overtaken by a social sector moving in the opposite direction.
It would represent a few small steps of progress, thanks to cooperation between the parties ― the kind that, not so long ago, would barely have seemed remarkable.
But in a country where presidents have enjoyed kinglike powers and often acted with regal arrogance, Mr. Fox's magnanimous bearing has seemed a remarkable shift.
The story has been playing in my mind recently, because all summer I have been puzzling over the lack of reaction in Britain to the Snowden revelations about US and UK communications surveillance, a lack that at some moments has seemed even more remarkable than the revelations themselves.
Which is one reason why the survival of World of Video, a small rental shop in the West Village, has seemed all the more remarkable.
Even to team officials, each milestone has seemed to be more remarkable than the next for a franchise that had struggled with injury and mediocrity in the previous 25 years: making the playoffs for the first time in four years, clinching the Atlantic Division, and clinching the top spot in the East.
This is a remarkable, estimable framework, but it has seemed ineffective at eliminating actual homophobia.
Second, synthetic biology raises with remarkable clarity an issue that has seemed of only theoretical interest until now.
