"The Newsroom" is still righteous and romantic, but the characters now compete less over virtue than over virtuosity.
"In Japan more than anywhere else, tidiness is less a virtue than a philosophy of living," that New York profile informs us.
In their modest way (modesty, in this case, being less a virtue than a worldview), they were acts of resistance, an aesthetic rejoinder to a world drowning in its own image.
Her songs have less transitory virtues: durable folky melodies, chiseled lyrics and quietly telling insights.
What ultimately makes this book enjoyable, though, is less the virtues of any particular story than its overall breadth and tone.
For instance, literacy and numeracy may easily be targeted, but improvements in schools in those areas may be at the expense of less measurable virtues, such as creativity.John Kay, an economist, says that the whole experiment is doomed.
Critics of big government remain suspicious of nudging: Mr Sunstein used a recent essay in the University of Chicago Law Review to endorse its less inflammatory virtues of reducing the regulatory burden and increasing government transparency.
But to write five novels (Scott) or seventeen (Nabokov) — to make a career — you must have, with brilliance, a number of less glamorous virtues, for example, patience, resilience, and courage.
The economics help, but so do some of the simpler or less celebrated virtues: conscience, connections, physical attraction, raw sex appeal, charm, even the ability to carry off a mentally and physically cruel disability and translate it into a force for some positive and unapologetic energy.
