In the absence of a strong, guiding leadership, strong urban planning laws or public forums where citizens might seriously grapple with a future L'Aquila, there is only the dawning sense that opportunity may be slipping away.
The role of the public intellectual is to raise the level of public conversation so that it might better grapple with the complex issues of the day; Dyson's essay further lowers it to the point of irrelevance.
Mr. Jiang may not need Beidaihe to cling to power, or Mr. Hu might have grappled with his predecessor as deftly at the beach as he has in Beijing.
The Doctor and Davros's philosophical discussions might have grappled with the meaning of home, the importance of friendship and the nature of mortality, but it all ultimately boiled down to the quality of mercy.
And if you feel comfortable speculating – as most of the media has for the past decade – that LaBeouf might be grappling with some mental health and/or addiction problems, you should feel just as comfortable believing that mental illness or addiction could have impaired his consent.
Mr. Bloomberg might have to grapple with that perception, too.
They were at a Christmas party in Downing Street, so they might as well grapple with the main man.
Otherwise they might have to grapple with the fact that Mr. Bush and his allies in Congress cut taxes, and presided over the disintegration of the Clinton-era budget surpluses.
Others say they are mirror "selfies" that are so poorly shot due to the intense hand shaking of the photographers who might have been grappling with alcohol withdrawal or cocaine jitters while trying to take a successful image of their clothing.
Between Sterger's cellphone and a deteriorating right arm, might football finally have to grapple with an unsightly Favre demise?
Had she eliminated them, too, we might have been able to grapple directly with what Lee has suggested but not quite conveyed: what it must feel like for an exceptional young woman to stand up to the theatre's ultimate Great White Father.
