Osama!" were meant in large part as a joke, even if a tasteless one.
But in Karzai's case the particular American actions that he claims outrage him do not involve some distant country; they are meant, in large measure, to prop him up.
It is conventional wisdom that sexual predators target children who are "vulnerable," and by vulnerability we mean, in large part — whether we care to admit it not — an existence outside the cosseted world of the affluent.
Later, after consulting a psychiatrist, Avedon was quoted as saying, "I have to be a little bit in love with my models" — doubtless a true statement if "love" is taken to mean, in large measure, an emotion induced by professional delight at successfully recording the personality and charm of the woman in question on film.
At the time, CEO Jeff Powers remarked to me that since the company still had money left over from its previous funding round, the Kickstarter was meant in large part to be a marketing tool that would help gauge the demand for its curious gadget.
The only Englishman who had read Die Blendung was the Sinologist Arthur Waley: "Imagine what it means in a large country, which for me was the country of Shakespeare and Dickens, to have one single reader".
One can argue what this means in a large, publicly-traded corporation.
Only intermittently, as when Ms. Slater describes undergoing brain surgery, is there a deeply compelling reason to wonder why she might have chosen to invent such an episode, or what it means in her larger story.
The downside of P.C.R. is that it is sold at a comparatively high price, which means that in large parts of the world, it might as well have never been invented.
